Mass Effect: Iron Rebirth
by Mashadar
Summary: Killed in action, Shepard is deemed lost to all save those who run Project Lazarus. But when betrayal strikes well before the Project is near completion, only one option is left to save him. An experimental brain to machine transplant. The Iron Rebirth.
1. Chapter 01: Complications

**DISCLAIMER  
**I don't own Mass Effect, Bioware does. Credit goes to SteamedBun for providing the initial concept of a different sort of Shepard with his story, but aside from the starting concept, the remainder of this particular one is my take on it, keeping in mind the original Bioware plot points. If you want to read SteamedBun's story, you can go here:

http: //www. fanfiction .net/s/5785095/1/Commander_Shepard_Ymir_Mech

Otherwise, read on.

* * *

**Chapter 01: Complications**

_Activation Protocol 12.0.02_

_Initiating primary boot sequence..._

_Memory check....complete  
_

_Optical Data Storage integrity check...complete_

_Command processes online  
_

_*IFF database update received*_

_*External Sensors online*_

_*Unknown Audio #1* _"-sure about this? We didn't even test the neural links for stability."

_*Unknown Audio #1. Human. Male. Warning. IFF Corrupted. Target #1 Designated.*_

_*Warning. Weapons discharge detected*_

_*Unknown Audio #2* _ "No time! We're dead either way if we don't do this!"

_*Unknown Audio #2. Human. Male. Weapon detected. Warning. IFF Corrupted. Target #2 Designated.*_

_*Threat response protocols online*_

_*Booting secondary priority protocols*_

_*Target #1 Audio:* _"Goddamnit it's on automatic! He's not awake yet! Get out! Get-"

_*Target #1 terminated. Cycling targets. Firing-*_

COMMAND OVERRIDE SIGMA

He woke to the sounds of gunfire and screaming. Instinct took over, and he dived for cover away from the gunfire. What he didn't expect was to crash into the wall with the screech of tortured bulkheads threatening to give way. The shock lasted for a moment, and he was back on his feet. It took him longer than he expected, his limbs didn't seem to want to respond as smoothly as he commanded. It took a few abortive tries before he was back on his feet, looking for the gunman. It had come from right next to him. A quick scan of the room revealed a pair of corpses, their bodies still twitching with the last spasm of life, but no one else. Had he? No. He didn't feel the weight of a gun in his hand. Or his hand. He looked down.

Instead of familiar digits, there was gleaming white armor plate. Rivets. Thick slabs of steel where his feet should be. Blocky, angular limbs and chest plates, all armored at rigid angles that would never fit around a human arm. A small printed emblem proudly proclaiming Arakure Weapons manufacture. Twin autocannons. His hand. He clenched a ghostly fist in surprise, and a hail of flechettes roared out of the autocannons, cratering the wall ahead. He let go and the storm stopped with a hiss, the weapons venting their accumulated heat in a cloud of hot steam. He caught his reflection on a piece of polished pipe. An unblinking monocular sensor pod glared back at him.

A machine. Two arms, two legs. All machine. He was a mech. And obviously not a synthetic personal assistant either. Who shot those people was pretty obvious now. He was... servos quietly whined as he brought his other arm, a rocket launcher judging by the weapon's size, to look at. Who was he?

_"-der Shepard, can you hear me?"_

He didn't hear it, but it was there, a female voice suddenly in his memory. Surprising as it was, the name struck him harder. Shepard. Yes. The confusion slipped away. He was Alexander Shepard... and he remembered choking on the hard vacuum of space as the last of his air leaked out through his damaged suit. If he wasn't trapped in some horrible nightmare, he could guess what had happened after the blackness claimed him. Not the most comforting of conclusions. But there was the voice to answer to. It made ignoring that one important question much easier.

_"YES"_ The booming voice was harsh, metallic, but it was better than being mute. _"IDENTITY. LOCATION."_

_"No time to explain. You need to get out of there. The whole station is overrun. I'm uploading the coordinates to you now."_

Shepard didn't hear anything like before, but he could recall the words clear as day. A moment later, a fresh memory landed on top of that. A map layout, and a marked exit. It was very disconcerting. He would have demanded more answers of the voice when the door leading out of the room exploded, sending debris flying everywhere. Gunfire roared through the smoking portal, catching Shepard in the open before he could dive for cover in his new, cumbersome form. Bullets sparked off his kinetic barriers, and he responded in kind. The first autocannon's roar went high, harmlessly chewing away at the bulkhead as the first intruder, a human sized mech, pushed past the smoke, gun blazing. Shepard would have cursed his body's clumsiness, fighting the way it lagged as he brought the weapon to bear on the machine, hostile shots sparking off his kinetic barriers. This time his aim was true, shredding the mech and its two companions that had just entered under a withering hail of armor piercing flechettes.

More mechs lay outside the hallway where they had intercepted his fire. They were smaller, more human shaped than his current form. Looking at them brought another alien memory to mind. These were LOKI security mechs, it seemed to say. Light weapons, light armor, but equally capable of killing as any soldier. Another one stepped through the door, droning a canned message about not resisting as its machine pistol chattered angrily, right into Shepard's field of fire. Another short burst from his autocannon tore it apart and sent it flying out the door. Crushing the fallen mech under his feet on the way out, something in the room caught his attention and he turned around to focus on it. He had been wrong with his earlier count. There were three bodies. The other was covered in a plastic wrap.

Clumping over to the covered body, he eyed the array of machines it was hooked up to, silent where they weren't smoking, sparking pieces of debris. He recognized a few of them as life support machines, the others were completely alien to him. Hesitant, but unable to stop himself, he clamped down on the wrap with his gun sheathe, tugging at the material until it fell away. The sight made him want to put it back. Commander Alexander Shepard, captain of the Normandy, first human Specter. That was who he was. Born on an Alliance cruiser, son of Cassandra and John Shepard. It only took a microsecond to go down that list. That was him. And right in front of him, laying on a slab, missing the entire back half of his head was Alexander Shepard.

He took a step back, carelessly tearing away the rest of the wrap still in his grip. The autocannon drifted over to face the body before he became aware of what he was doing, forcing the weapon down. That _was _Alexander Shepard. That was his face, even with those scars, staring back blankly into the ceiling. That was his body, lying like a lump of meat with bits of cold metal gleaming where the cuts and tears were large enough to peer through. Surprisingly, that last thought helped him calm down as his marine training kicked in.

Think of it as just a battlefield injury instead of... him. And that he was simply using a prosthetic until the doctors could patch up his meat body. He could have a case of fidgets later, if he still could. Dammit, he had survived the weeks of thresher maw attacks in that godforsaken colony on Akuze when nobody else had. He would survive this. The body's missing brain didn't escape his notice. He hoped that just meant it was sitting somewhere inside of this overbuilt metal man. And that it was really him. If not, that voice and he were going to have a long talk once this was over.

For a little while, he considered carrying the body with him. They brought him back, transferred his brain to this machine. Maybe they could... no. . Focus on surviving. The station was filled with an unknown number of hostiles. He didn't have any hands, and trying to carry and shield a body from enemy fire in this shell would only distract him. Cut losses and keep moving. It was a better deal than being dead, and he intended to keep it that way.

The other humans in the facility weren't so lucky. Clumping through the station, adjusting to his new body, Shepard passed hallways littered with bodies. Many shot in the back as they were running away. The mechs had been relentless in their slaughter, and very few of the dead clutched a weapon. If he still had a mouth, he would have scowled. He didn't know these people. Maybe they even deserved death. But not like this. Not a massacre. Once, he ran across a uniformed couple, both armed with heavy pistols. He had tried calling out to get them to stop, but they took one look at him and darted into a hallway. A fatal mistake. Mechs had been waiting for them, and when he got there, they were already dead. Tearing the smaller machines apart with his heavy weapons was a poor vengeance.

A wet cough caught his attention, and he turned around, finding one of the crew had survived. For a little while. Her chest was riddled with holes, and a mangled wreck of an arm tried to steady her as she crawled away. Then she noticing his gaze. She whimpered, falling on her back and bringing the pistol to bear uselessly on him.

"STOP. NO HARM INTENDED."

Her eyes widened to an impossible size at his voice. Then she laughed, a hysterical wet gurgling sound. Medigel he didn't have might save her, but maybe her partner had some to spare now that he wouldn't be needing anymore. Shepard took a step closer. That was when she pressed the gun to her head and pulled the trigger. Just like in Akuze.

He turned his head away. Not again.

"Check, check, is anyone alive on this frequency?"

Shepard turned back to the unexpected voice, spotting the fallen ear piece one of the station crew must have worn. He reached out by habit, and nearly crushed the piece with the steel slabs that were his arms. He would have hissed with frustration, but his machine body remained silent. He didn't even have an omni-tool, if he could somehow use the blasted thing. How was he going to use this thing with no fingers?

_*Active wireless signal detected: Frequency 114.01*_

This, this was different. It wasn't that voice in his head, but the knowledge was there. Of course. The mech must have had a Virtual Intelligence interface. He just had to switch to frequency 114.01...

_*Network protocols identified. Switching frequency. Secondary connection established._*

Which the VI was already doing. This was easier than he had thought.

_"IDENTITY."_

_"What the... who the hell is this?"_

A blip appeared in the map of Shepard's mind, glowing with a dull red. The other person on the radio unless he missed his guess. Friend? Foe? He started walking. It wasn't far off. He'd get answers soon enough.

_"IDENTITY."_

_"Chief medical officer Williams._ _Now who the hell is this? Why do you sound like a... shit!"_

_*Connection terminated at source*_

Shepard sped up the pace, and went from a deliberate stomping gait to a rattling and clumsy walk. Shepard felt like biting off another curse as his shoulder caught on the edge of the hallway with a shriek of metal. Basic control was simple enough he found. Think of the act of walking, and his body walked without tripping over his own feet. But the change in height perception and massive bulk made it impossible to run without clumsily clipping things. Up ahead, a reinforced door slid open, and a human head poked through it. He didn't even have time to call out when he caught a telltale glow of an omnitool. His kinetic barriers exploded in a shower of light. On reflex, he brought up his weapon.

"STOP."

In hindsight, he probably shouldn't have bothered. The man up ahead yelped and vanished around back into the room, the heavy door sliding shut. Shepard made it to door just in time to see the holographic control display winking out to an angry red denying all entry. Server Room B was in lockdown. Banging on the heavily armored door would have been unproductive, so he took a step back, preparing to blast at it with his other arm. Superheated steam was venting out of the rocket launcher's charging ports when there the voice called him again.

_"Shepard, hurry up, there isn't... time left... mechs overrun...."_

Static and gunfire punctuated the blank spots. The situation was going from bad to worse. But he wasn't about to leave someone behind. He returned his attentions to battering down the door.

_"SURVIVOR LOCATED. ATTEMPTING EXTRACTION."_

_"There isn't time... mechs closing... everywhere... explain when you... incoming... destroy station... shuttle bay before..."_

_*Primary connection terminated at source*_

Shepard took a look at the door, weighing his options. It was still standing, if pockmarked by his efforts to break it down. She mentioned something incoming, and the station being destroyed. Warships? He didn't know what defenses the station had, but from the silence, either no one was running them, or they were destroyed. Both possibilities boded badly for his chances. The other alternatives didn't say a lot for his chances either. Reactor damage? Uncontrolled de-orbit? He didn't think he'd have a lot of time if any of them were the case. He began to move out when a a flicker of motion caught his eye. A patrol of LOKI mechs clattered into the hallway from where he had come from. Instead of firing, they completely ignored him as they walked ahead, guns at the ready. They had just passed him when a gun poked around the corner and fired, the single shot taking the head off one of the mechs. Simultaneously, a blue tinged ball of distorted air materialized and streaked down towards him.

The old Shepard would have been able to dive out of the way before it hit. In his current body, he was simply too cumbersome. He had barely moved out of the way before it struck his left arm. Armor plates buckling with a groan under the biotic assault, pulling him nearly off balance. That was when the server room door slid open again, revealing the other man with his glowing omni-tool.

_*Warning_. _Process corruption detected. Command error. Administrator access granted. Priority conflict.*_

His vision started to flicker, his body already falling over, but that didn't stop him from seeing the black uniformed biotic clearing the hallway, the other mechs already destroyed. He tried lifting his arm, speaking, anything, only to find that nothing was responding. He felt a bolt of panic in realization. Hacking, and a pincer trap. Not like this! He wouldn't let it end like this! He needed control. Now.

_*Primary control interface non-functional. Direct control established.*_

A thousand voices immediately shrilled in his head_. _Status updates, kinetic barrier strength, reactor power levels, myomer fiber stress levels, remaining munitions, life support nutrient levels, gyroscope warnings and a multitude of other demands drilled their cacophony of noise into his head. Shepard pushed through them all with single minded determination.

"STOP" Shepard punctuated the booming words by shoving his rocket launcher into the hacker's face, arresting his fall by slamming the other arm onto the ground. Another shrill stress alarm blared in his head. "CEASE FIRE." This to the other black clad man who was rapidly backing away into cover. He hoped they bought it. He could barely focus on keeping the weapon arm straight, but he was sure he could fire it at least once.

"Command override zeta twelve one, command override zeta twelve one! Override damn you!" Shepard turned his head back to the hacker, and the man instantly fell silent with a whimper, not even able to back away from the barrel of death in his face. His omni-tool winked out.

_*Cyclic redundancy check complete. Restoring process database. Restarting primary control interface.*_

The voices subsided immediately, leaving Shepard's head clear enough to speak further. "I AM SHEPARD."

Omni-tool man sputtered. "Shepard? But that's-"

"Shepard? Damn. Things must have been really bad for Miranda to have Jason's techs put you in that casing." The dark skinned biotic poked his head around the corner, exposing very little of himself. Smart of him. "They must have been around when you woke up. Do you know what happened to them?"

Shepard forbore saying anything. That was going to be his demon to deal with. Better nobody else knew about it. The biotic seemed to draw a conclusion from his silence, hissing in frustration as he popped out of cover. "The mechs got them did they? Don't worry about it Shepard. We're just lucky you woke up in time to defend yourself. The name's Jacob Taylor, chief of station security. Or what's left of it. And that's doctor Wilson. He was the one who patched you up. You can relax Wilson. He's not just one of the mechs."

There was a shrill laugh to that. "R-r-relax? With a gun to my face?" Shepard acknowledged the point by letting his arm fall to the floor, followed by a thump as Wilson fell flat on his backside. "God. You scared fifty years of life out of me."

Shepard leaned forward, looming over the man in a way most would have found intimidating. He would not be forgetting what had just happened anytime soon. Wilson twitched.

"NECESSARY."

"Maybe not." Jacob raised an eyebrow when Shepard turned to stare at the man, but he looked him straight in the optics "But you don't look any different than any of the YMIR mechs we have around here and those have gone rogue as well. The techs could have painted the body a different color at least, save us some of the unpleasantness just now." Somehow, Shepard doubted that. Jacob must have read the silence correctly, because he shook his head in bemusement. "Probably not huh? Can't count on people paying attention to your paint job when you've got that autocannon and every other heavy mech is trying to shoot at us."

"SITUATION."

"Right, you probably don't have any idea what's going on. Your ship was attacked and destroyed out in the Traverse. Except for a handful of servicemen in the lower decks and Navigator Pressley, everyone else and all the aliens got out unscathed. You weren't so lucky. That's where we came in with the Lazarus project. We got your body back and spent two years, just a month short of the full two, trying to put you back in one piece. In case you hadn't noticed, we're having a bit of technical difficulties with that plan." Off in the distance, there was the faint rattle of gunfire, followed by a muffled thump Shepard's long years of experience identified as a concussive grenade going off. Jacob didn't seem to hear it, and continued without pause. "Other than that, there's not much else I can tell you I'm afraid. Those two years were pretty quiet, the only time I ever fired my gun then was at the firing range. And then this happened. I was getting ready to bunk down when the station mechs turned on us."

"SABOTAGE."

He frowned at that. "That... could be possible, but I doubt it. I inspected every last one of these mechs before we brought them online. Reprogramming all of them like this would need the master override codes, and nobody but me and Miranda should have them. Not that it matters anymore. The mechs won't respond to any of those overrides. Come on, we can figure it out later once we're out of here."

"Jacob? What the hell is going on?" Wilson's voice had taken on an angry hysterical edge, cutting across anything else Jacob might have said. "This... this can't be Shepard. I spent nearly two years working on his body and this overgrown tin can isn't him! It's not possible."

This was the doctor who brought him back? He wanted to ask more but Wilson was still babbling.

"His brain didn't even have enough synaptic activity to keep the heart beating. It barely registered on the electroencephalography charts. He was a vegetable. There was no way that a bunch of techs could get a spike in brain activity that fast. Even if they did, he would have had a hell of a time adapting to his old body, if the trauma didn't kill him outright, much less a mech. And I damn well know his brain didn't go missing for any tech to stick in a goddamn mech for calibration." He stabbed a finger in Shepard's direction "_That, _is a medical impossibility. It's got to be an AI."

Vegetable? AI? Shepard found his dislike of the doctor's bedside manner growing. Luckily for him, Jacob stepped in before he could go any further. But there was something that didn't fit right.

"Relax Wilson. You're losing me with the medical talk, but I saw the tech, it really is him. I don't have all the details, but this was the backup plan, in case things didn't pan out. Need to know basis only. Guess we were lucky Miranda thought about it. But this isn't really the time to argue over what's possible."

That was the second time this Miranda was mentioned. Shepard guessed she was the project director, probably the one who had been talking to him earlier. Given their last communication, her chances were poor, but Jacob was right. A link up was out of the question. He didn't even know where she was, or if she was alive, and the station itself was under threat. He forbore telling Jacob about their last communication. He didn't doubt the man's word on not having time, but sometimes, you never knew how they would react. He filed that away the knowledge on Miranda for future reference, focusing on what Jacob had said. Chief _medical _officer. The last dot connected, and Shepard turned on the Wilson, optics whirring as he focused on the man. He gestured with the autocannon. "WILSON CONTAINS FUNCTIONAL MECH OVERRIDE."

"What? Are you-" To his credit, Jacob's surprise lasted only a moment as he turned back to the doctor, a quiet edge to his voice. "Why are you here anyway Wilson? This is the security wing. Medical is on the other side of the station."

"There were mechs and... this is ridiculous! I don't have any mech overrides! If that's really Shepard, he's just revived. He wouldn't know up from down. He's obviously confused." Shepard could see Wilson's deflection having an effect as Jacob relaxed slightly. "Besides, the controls are locked out."

Jacob was quick to catch the slip, but Wilson was faster. His pistol was already cleared of the holster when Jacob reached for his. A blue flash of biotic energy flared as Shepard's autocannon barked, slamming the doctor against the bulkheads and reducing his gun hand into red ruin. Jacob followed up by jamming his gun in Wilson's face before he could even scream. "You son of a bitch! You're the one who set this up?!"

"You don't understand! None of us would have been left alive once the project was done. Miranda would have had us all killed with the mechs. That's why I-"

"Why you what?" Jacob's contemptuous snarl cut short Wilson's babbling. "Wiped out the rest of the crew? Tried to get us all killed? Or did you sell us out?" He shoved the doctor back to the ground, kicking away the shattered remains of his weapon. "Come on Shepard, we can leave Wilson to rot. Let's get out of here while there's still a here to get out of."

Shepard didn't turn to follow. Not immediately. Losing his body hadn't made him any poorer a judge of character. Wilson's words sounded true enough. But there was also a lot more to it. Optics clicked quietly as he observed the doctor shakily applying a pack of medi-gel to the stump of his right hand. Wilson gritted his teeth as the gelatinous white strip warmed, darkening as it wrapped around the wound. It only took a few seconds to harden completely, and when it did, Shepard made his decision by pointing the autocannon at the doctor's head. He jerked back, legs kicking as he tried to push himself deeper into the bulkhead.

"Oh god. Shepard, I put you back together. I saved your life. Don't do this. Please!"

"RISE."

Wilson complied hastily, but Jacob turned to look incredulously at him. "What? You can't seriously be considering taking him along with us? What for?"

"INTERROGATION."

A few seconds ticked by as Jacob just continued to stare at Shepard's unblinking optics. Jacob sighed. "Alright, we'll do it your way Shepard. Just be ready to shoot him in case he tries to cause us any trouble."

Shepard replied by gesturing his autocannon at Wilson, an act that seemed to both satisfy Jacob and cow the doctor.

"OBEY."

* * *

When they finally reached the hanger bay, Shepard found himself revising the planned interrogation.

Six people were waiting in ambush for them, popping up from behind cover once they had entered the bay. Most were armed with rifles, but one had a rocket launcher trained on Shepard. They weren't wearing the black and silver of the station crew, but yellow painted combat armor that he recognized from his Alliance briefings a lifetime ago. Eclipse mercenaries, and not here for a friendly visit. One of them, a Salarian, stepped out of cover to speak, spherical combat drones floating besides his head. "If you have any interest in breathing for the next two minutes, don't try anything stupid. My men already have you in their sights. Your mech might do some damage, but it won't stop us from killing all of you before you even twitch."

They thought he was just an ordinary mech, Shepard realized. Good, he could make use of that. Optics clicked as he scanned the room, noting mercenary positions and more hazards alike. Jacob continued to train his gun on the Salarian. It would never punch through the mercenary's kinetic barriers before he was shot, but something in the way he held himself said that he still had a trick up his sleeve. Wilson on the other hand, the doctor let out a sigh of relief as he took a step forward towards the Salarian. "Mollus? It's me, Wilson. Listen-" a gunshot cut him off with a flinch.

"Wilson. Is it?" Mollus hissed from behind the smoking barrel of his shotgun. "I see you've managed to make that particular mech work for you, and not just shoot everything that moves. Unlike every other damn mech on this station. That was an unpleasant surprise you had waiting for us in the shuttle dock. Mechs kill station security, and we'd make the pick up? Should have known better than to trust a human to stick to the plan. I should kill you for that, but our employer wants you alive and intact as well as the package." He gestured towards Jacob with his shotgun. "And who's this? He's not the package. They didn't say anything about extras."

Pulling himself together, Wilson laughed weakly at the question. He began walking towards Mollus "He's not. Listen. The mech is Shep-" Shepard opened fire.

Wilson's last words died as a flechette exploded through his chest. The next round would have caught Mollus unarmored head, but Shepard's control over this body remained imperfect and the shot went wide. The mercenary broke out of his shock, diving to the ground. Luckily, his rocket launcher was self guiding and not hampered by his poor aim. The Salarian had only time enough to look up when the rocket struck him full in the face and exploded. Air distorted around the human with the rocket launcher, slamming her into the ceiling, presenting a target he couldn't possibly miss. Autocannon rounds tore her to rags. Four left. Impact sparks began flaring around Shepard's barriers while others cratered the floor where Jacob had stood a moment ago.

Behind the kinetic shield, optics whirred and clicked. Shepard swung the autocannon towards a pair of mercenaries creeping out from behind a stripped out shuttle. They spotted the movement, ducking under cover as his fire hammered the craft. Motion on his left formed into the other group of mercenaries, battering away at his shields. He ignored them, autocannon rounds battering the shuttle and ripping hull metal apart. One of the rounds must have struck something vital, as the shuttle vanished in a flash of light, leaving behind only tortured steel and blackened streaks on the ground where the mercenaries had hidden.

Shepard turned towards the remaining pair of mercenaries, a constant stream of fire from them causing Shepard's barrier to shimmer with a threatened overload. He tried to return fire, but his autocannon remained silent, vents hissing with coolant steam. The rocket launcher clicked uselessly. A pistol cracked twice in the chatter of rifle fire, and a mercenary crumpled bonelessly, clutching the ruins of his face. The other ducked behind cover, exposing only his arm and chattering rifle. Servos whining, he accelerated into the stream of fire, closing to melee distance. But instead of pausing to vault the crate as he intended, his legs continued running. Several tons of charging metal hulk rammed into the packing crate the mercenary hid behind, and inertia took over. The crate went sparking across the ground, the mercenary's terrified shriek cut off with a wet crunch when it smashed into the bulkhead.

A flicker of motion caught Shepard's attention. He turned to find a mercenary crawling away, blood pumping from the head wound Jacob had given him. A grenade fumbled in his fingers. He didn't get two paces when Shepard's armored foot came down on the mercenary's back with a crack of shattering hardsuit. The man yelled in pain, grenade skittering away with arming cap still attached. The autocannon pressed down on his head. He had only a moment to look up before his head vanished under a storm of fire, spattering Shepard's optics with gore. When the smoke cleared, he stepped back from the red stain on the ground, superheated steam hissing from his thermal ports. Scanning the area, he caught sight of Jacob swiftly moving from corpse to corpse, checking to see if they were all dead.

"ALL HOSTILES TERMINATED."

The station security chief paused in his search to shoot a brief look in Shepards direction. "I'll say. You really tore them apart. Didn't think you'd to shoot Wilson though, after all the trouble you went to bringing him along." He shook his head. "He really sold us out big time. Not just hacking the mechs, but bringing in Eclipse? He must have had an outside man before he was brought into the project. Seems like someone really doesn't like you."

He could think of a lot of someones who didn't like him, enough to want him staying dead. Batarians, pirates, slavers, mercenaries, power brokers, a few Turians, probably the entire Krogan race for blowing up Saren's cloning facility, the list went on. Alliance N7 operations, and his duties as a Specter, were not exactly geared towards earning him friends. Pruning out those who were already dead, that still left a list long enough to fill a starship. But that didn't mean these mercenaries were out for him. "LACKS REASON."

"You're kidding right? The man who took down Sovereign, back from the dead, isn't reason enough? That was the whole point of the project. Anyway we'll find out who and why sooner or later I bet." Pulling out a memory chip from the Salarian's hardsuit, Jacob's omni-tool glowed for a few seconds as he scanned its contents. When the tool beeped, he pointed down the hanger bay towards the shuttle docks. "Looks like we got lucky. This was a recon team. The rest of the mercenaries are waiting for this one to check in before coming station side. Come on, the shuttles are that way. We can borrow their transport and jump out before they figure who's really driving it. Probably."

Probably. That didn't sound very hopeful. The shuttle dock doors quietly slid open and Shepard turned, leveling his autocannon at the intruder. Jacob stopped him with a hasty gesture.

"Miranda? Wait. How did you-"

"Get past Eclipse? Through the airlock." The newcomer answered easily, stepping daintily past the corpses without a second glance. Shepard idly noted that this Miranda wasn't in a uniform like the rest of the station crew. The only similarity to them was the emblem pinned on her jumpsuit. "Eclipse isn't as thorough protecting their rear as they would like to think." She stopped in front of Wilson's corpse to give it a brief look. "I see you've dealt with our traitor as well. And in the back too. I'm surprised Jacob. I didn't think you had it in you."

"That... wasn't me." Jacob ran a hand through his close shaved hair, gesturing with a flick of his eyes.

Miranda turned to look at Shepard, sizing him up with smile that didn't reach her cold, calculative eyes. If she found his size or bloody glowing optics to be disturbing, she didn't let on the slightest. No stranger to bloodshed this one. "Ah Shepard, good to see that the backup plan is working. I take it we owe most of this destruction to your new changes." It wasn't a question, and Shepard didn't feel inclined to answer. She nodded, as if getting the answer that she wanted. Jacob took the moment to step up.

"Shepard, this is Miranda Lawson. She was the one in charge of the Lazarus project at this facility."

"Not for much longer I'm afraid." She stated frankly, a slightly bitter edge to her voice. "Shepard is back, if not complete, and Eclipse isn't going to oblige us the facility. I certainly won't let them have it either. Fortunately, that particular loose end is tied up. The station's self destruct will take care of that once we leave."

Self destruct? Logically, it made sense. Who knew what the mercenaries would do with a base like this, or who they'd sell it to? But that meant watching his flesh and blood body go up in a controlled nova, and any chance of getting it back. Not surprisingly, he didn't like the idea. He turned an optic towards Miranda.

"BODY."

"I'm sorry Shepard." She sighed. "Even if we had the time to collect it, with Wilson gone and your current condition, it wouldn't help. Your body is irrecoverable at this point. I don't like it anymore than you do, but our options were limited. Attempting a revival with your biological body in that state would have killed you. If we had the time for a proper transplantation it could have been salvaged but, given the circumstances, the only process we had the time to perform is irreversible." For a moment, she looked genuinely troubled before she straightened her back with a placating gesture of her hands. "Come on. We need to take the Eclipse transport and leave before they wise up. My employer would like to see you."

If he had eyebrows, Shepard would have twitched. Irreversible? He was trapped here, in this overgrown tin can, forever? He resisted the sudden irrational urge to gun down the woman, and maybe throw himself out the airlock or into a reactor core. But he had refused to let Akuze break him, and he wouldn't break down here either. He bit down the anger, focusing on her last sentence instead.

"EMPLOYER. IDENTITY."

"Not my place to say Shepard. You'll find out when you speak to him. It's where we're going now." She called back, already heading for the armed dropship that had brought the Eclipse mercenaries. She paused at the pilot hatch, taking the time to drag out a pair of bleeding bodies. "Shepard, you should be able to fit in the troop compartment. It's big enough."

Shepard took a look and weighed his options. Stay on the station, fight hostile mechs and an unknown number of likely angry mercenaries, get consumed in the upcoming fireball, or leave the station with the only people who had the necessary fingers to control a shuttle and were not actively trying to kill him? The survivor of Akuze found the decision easy. The rest of him found it harder to swallow, but followed suit, watching the cargo hatch close and leaving him in the dark.

* * *

The troop compartment was dark, leaving him alone to his thoughts. He found that he cared for very few of them.

The escape from the station had been smooth, almost perfunctory in how clean and effortless it had been. The Eclipse gunboat waiting like a predatory insect over the station had asked a few questions once they had cleared the bay. Status reports. Where they were going. What in a Krogan's fourth testicle did they think they doing and to get back here. Those queries had been quietly ignored as distance increased between them, away from the upcoming blast. A final warning, and then the ominous beep of a targeting radar painting the transport. Then the station's reactor core had gone up, the antimatter pile burning away as a short lived star of impossible brightness, consuming the station and melting the Eclipse ship like butter in a furnace before the fireball engulfed it. The expanding cloud of plasma, the jump to lightspeed, all of that happened mere moments later. And then he had been left in the darkness once again.

Up in the pilots compartment, Jacob and Miranda were conversing in hushed tones. Occasionally, they would direct a glance his way through the troop door before returning to their discussion. Discussions of his mental stability. Memories. Personality. He didn't acknowledge them. Something in the way he had been brought back let him recall every memory since his waking with precise detail. Every shot, every face down to their individual features. He only had to think it to see and hear it in holovid quality detail. He suspected that if he wanted to, he could review every last word exchanged between the two at a later date. But the one memory he found himself dwelling on right now, he wished he could forget.

_'The process is irreversible. I'm sorry Shepard.'_

He didn't want to believe her. He had been dead. It was almost funny how blase that thought seemed. He remembered dying, the last gasp that didn't fill the lungs, the struggle to get one, just one more gulp of sweet air, amidst the white hot debris of the Normandy, and then the cold silence that made vacuum seem noisy. The dimming vision, the fading strain of his lungs as they pumped uselessly, he remembered all of it. He was dead, but they had brought him back. There should have been a way, somehow. But the birth of a temporary star had been the end of any hopes and objections. His body was gone forever, more thoroughly than bullets, biotics and asphyxiation could ever accomplish. But he wasn't dead. He was trapped inside this pseudo existence, more machine than... mostly machine.

He felt clumsy in this body. His control over its motions were rudimentary at best. The crisp, fluid motions he had been used to as a human were gone. And he couldn't feel. There were no tactile senses in this body. Taste, smell, those two were likely gone forever as well. He was not deaf nor blind, but he had lost everything else. He was fine now, but how would he cope with its loss in the long term? Now he knew how the quarians felt, living their entire lives trapped in environmental suits for fear of fatal infection. Would he be able to adapt?

The survivor in him said yes. If Thresher maws could not do it in that week of deadly nightmares when everyone else died or killed themselves to escape the horror, then a life trapped in this shell would not unman him. He had been brought back for a reason. Raising the dead, a notion that disturbed him until he was one of them, could not have been cheap. Bringing back the dead was a fantastical notion, and would definitely need equally fantastical resources. And more importantly, a very good reason. Yes. That was something to help him hold on. A reason to come back. One he could throw himself into.

His crew mates on the lost SSV Normandy would have reason enough. But unless Garrus, Liara or Tali had actually been secret billionaires, they couldn't have commanded such resources. Perhaps the Council had finally taken his claims of the Reapers seriously and wanted him at the forefront of the fight. Or maybe they were just repaying the debt owed for having their scaly, or shapely when considering the Asari matriach, alien behinds saved by the Specter they had dismissed as 'mentally unsound'. It was the least they could do. Repaying one life, his, for the three most powerful people in galactic politics he had preserved. That was a good trade, wasn't it?

And could he complain? It was his brain, so he was still him. And he was alive, in a body that even a six hundred pound Krogan of pure muscle would never be able to match in raw power or durability. How often had it been that he had found himself in situations where the firepower of the Mako would have been useful, but the conditions too cramped to bring in the infantry fighting vehicle? Or the durability of the layers of heavy armor plate it carried? He had all of those now.

But the price was not to his liking.

As the ship lurched in acceleration, the telltale sign of a mass relay jump, he lifted an arm to his optics. The autocannon's protective sheathe opened and closed with an experimental flex of his mental fingers, mimicking his flesh and blood ones. Maybe he could learn to adapt to the machine, adjust to its size and quirks, make it move like he used to when he was flesh and blood. Maybe he could learn to live without more than half the senses he had grown up with. He could and would adapt. The survivor would. But the machine had little in the way of expressive capability. How many times had bloodshed been averted with smooth words and a convincing expression? How often had he drawn in the allegiances from the most unlikely of people, those who would become his closest shipmates, in that other life, simply because he had been able to bring them around to his way of thinking with words? Action had always backed those words, but without words, action alone would have been meaningless.

He had tried already to form full sentences in the station, before and after meeting Jacob. Every attempt was a dismal failure. He didn't try to pretend to understand the underlying technology that allowed him to command the machine's audio systems and turn thoughts of speaking into actual words, but he knew it was far from adequate. Complex words and sentences came out flat, shortened to a simple vocabulary and completely devoid of the man called Alexander Shepard. Who would believe this machine to be him? Pitifully few, if any, would believe those claims. And who could blame them? Alexander Shepard had been a human, a face, a person. He was a bipedal war machine with all the grace and animation of badly crafted toy. An articulate giant potato man would make a more believable Shepard.

And two years. Gone just like that. What was fresh five hours ago was now two years old plus five hours. Jacob had told him his friends and shipmates had escaped Normandy's end, but that was where it ended. Were they still alive? Were they still committed to the cause they had joined when they had chosen to follow him? Or had it died when he had? Had they died as well, either in pursuit of his quest or by some other tragedy? Had they gone on to live their lives, finding a piece of normality to return to after the hunt for Saren had ended? What had happened in his... absence? Not knowing, worse, knowing that even if he knew he would be able to do nothing to change the outcome, gnawed away at him.

"Shepard, we'll be landing in a few minutes. I know you've got a lot of questions, but you'll have to wait a bit more. Our employer will have the answers you'll need." Miranda's voice cut through his musings as the ship lurched again, this time in deceleration. Shepard considered them for a moment, let out a not-sigh and felt a stab of irritation at the silence. Even that small human comfort was denied. He pushed aside the irritation, and his previous concerns, craning the sensor pod that was his head towards the cockpit. Sure enough, a station loomed up ahead. Soon, he would find out why he was brought back.

And the reason, hopefully a good one. If not, the Reapers were still out there. The thought strengthened his resolve, stiffening a back he did not have. He had been lost earlier, overwhelmed by what had happened to him But he had sworn to end the Reaper threat one way or another. Dying hadn't changed that. The Reapers were still out there, as did the threat they posed. If coming back in this shell was the price to pay to finish that task and end the cycle of galactic extinction, what did that matter?

He hoped he never found out.

* * *

A/N: A return after a long hiatus from writing Fanfiction. Here's to hoping that I haven't gotten rusty in those years. Reviews, rants, criticisms and accusations of plagiarism welcome (maybe not so much the last.)


	2. Chapter 02: Growing Pains

**Chapter 02: Growing Pains**

Cigarette smoke coiled lazily in the air, disappearing into the darkness as the projection of the smoker drew another puff. Backlit only by the projection of a blue star and the embers of his cigarette, the man studied Shepard with calm calculating eyes, flickering light patterns on the iris betraying their inorganic origins. Grey streaked his hair, but the man's face could have been of any age over twenty. He took a sip from a glass of indeterminate liquid, sitting comfortably in a reclining chair as he let the silence stretch, occasionally glancing at the datapad sitting on the desk to his right. Shepard knew of the trick. Darkness and silence was the man's way of intimidation in this meeting, gauging his responses and weaknesses by how he chose to speak. A collected, dangerous man.

Shepard simply remained silent, returning that calculating look with an unblinking one that glowed red in the darkness.

"Shepard." The man broke the silence first, exhaling a cloud of tobacco smoke as he did so. "You're probably wondering who I am, and why you're here."

A few names suggested themselves. Not the man's, but organizations he could have headed. Nothing small could have afforded the price of robbing death like they did with him. He did not think he would get the man's real name either way. As to the reasons, that revelation would come with his identity. So far, he had neither. He continued his silence, playing the man's game.

"My name is unimportant, though I am told Alliance intelligence calls me Illusive Man." He paused, watching Shepard as he took another pull from his cigarette. A finger idly tapped the cigarette, and he leaned forward slightly. Though his expression never changed, Shepard found his suspicions climbing.

"I head Cerberus."

Shepard was well versed in controlling his emotions and reactions, but Cerberus? An eyebrow would have risen, had he still possessed them. It was not one of the guesses he would have made. But it made sense. Though Alliance dossiers available to him as both Specter and marine commander had been scarce on the topic, what little mention there had been on that particular group of extremists suggested significant resources and agents at their disposal. His first hand knowledge of their operations certainly suggested no lack of funds to carry out ambitious galaxy wide operations while still remaining hidden from public scrutiny. Aside from the Alliance, they were the only other human organization with the resources and scientific knowledge to pull this off.

But they were the last people he would have expected to want him back.

His past dealings with Cerberus had always been at muzzle velocity. The organization's dark reputation as utterly ruthless extremists was well earned. Aside from Saren and his Geth, Cerberus had been the next biggest threat he had faced in his duties as a Specter. Enslaving colonists with Thorian creepers, sacrificing them to create unliving Geth husks, testing tank bred Rachni soldiers on defenseless colonies, they were an organization beyond any moral horizon he could imagine, and extremely dangerous. Admiral Kohaku had paid the ultimate price just for peering too deeply at their actions. Shepard on the other hand, had personally destroyed many of their bases, shutting down horrific Cerberus operations with extreme prejudice and high explosives. And they wanted him back? Likely spent an incredible fortune just to revive his corpse? Something must have seriously gone wrong. Or he really was dead, and this was hell.

"REASON FOR RETURN."

"Yes, I imagine you would be a bit worried about that." He replied with an absolutely calm face, stubbing out the burnt remains of his cigarette on an ashtray. He paused before replying, letting the silence drag out for almost too long before he leaned back, the patterns on his cybernetic eyes flickering even faster. "I'll get straight to the point. You and I both know that the Reaper threat is far from over, and while you were gone, they've been busy. Entire colonies have been disappearing. Human colonies. We think someone is working with the Reapers, much like Saren and the Geth worked for Sovereign. That's why we brought you back. You've not just fought them first hand, you've beaten them. We're hoping that you'll be able to help us do so again."

"REAPERS."

The flat monotone made it impossible to express his doubt. Colonies had been raided before. Mindor had it's population of thousands reduced to a bare half dozen in the space of a day by Batarian slavers. If the Batarians had been improving on their methods over the Alliance, a complete pillaging of colonies was not inconceivable. Why risk losing valuable merchandise and pillage when you can strip the place wholesale after all. Reapers on the other hand left nothing behind but ruins and corpses. The implanted memories from the Prothean beacon and his talk with their vanguard Sovereign from another life had been very empathic about that. Living machine starships of incredible power, they came, ruthlessly wiped out every space faring species in the galaxy and moved on into the great void beyond the galactic edge until the next cycle of extinction. Their passage would have been impossible to miss save that they left no one alive to witness the aftermath. Disappearing colonists... just didn't sound like them.

The Illusive Man seemed to have predicted his response however, as he smoothly continued. "Hundreds of thousands of colonists Shepard. This isn't a successful slaving run. More than a dozen worlds in the edges of the Attican Traverse have been attacked, and because the patterns are random, nobody is paying attention."

Hundreds of thousands of colonists? That made it seem even more unlikely. And even if no one knew the identity of the raiders, why weren't the colonists fleeing from the border worlds in droves?

"EVIDENCE."

"I would be disappointed if you believed me without any proof." He took another drink, and for a half second, a frown creased that impassive face. "That is part of the problem. The attacks leave no evidence. A world simply goes dark without warning, and when someone does investigate, the colonists are gone without a trace. No one knows how it's done. Officially, the Council and Alliance downplay the numbers and blame slavers out in the Traverse, but we both know that's not true. Miranda will forward what data we've managed to gather on the attacks to you. I admit that it's not much, but the only way to get more solid evidence would be to wait for another colony to be attacked." He put his drink down to look implacably at Shepard. "I don't propose waiting for that to happen while we can do something about it, but we may not have a choice."

In that last sentence, Shepard could agree. Even if the Reapers were uninvolved, if the attacks were as bad as claimed, whoever and whatever lay behind them was a powerful enemy. Something or someone with the ability to silence entire worlds, erase all existence of their population that left no evidence on how, and do all that before anyone else could respond? Not even the Turian Hierarchy and their military juggernaut could do that. This was a threat he couldn't ignore. Focusing on only the Reapers might stop the cycle of extinction, but at the cost of not having anyone left to see the aftermath.

"DECISION PENDING."

This was Cerberus. Any normal, uninvolved, person would have plentiful reason to distrust them and their motives. Shepard was neither normal, nor was he uninvolved. He had a personal score to settle with every last cretinous vermin wearing their colors. But if the Reaper threat was real... he could put that on hold until they were done. _If_ it was real.

The Illusive Man nodded slightly. "I understand you have reservations Shepard, but I'm hoping that we can put that behind us. Take all the time you need to go over the data, but I assure you, the threat is real."

Shepard nodded, turning to leave the communications room as the projection went dark. If the threat was real, he could put aside his grudges, finish what he had set out to do a lifetime ago. That would always come first, even if his mind churned at the idea of cooperating with Cerberus to do it. And if the threat was a manufactured Cerberus ploy, some kind of trick to get him working for them, well, he was in their midst now. If it was Cerberus...

Reapers would be the least of their worries.

* * *

Miranda's office on the Minuteman station could have been the same as her old one in the destroyed Lazarus Research Station. It hadn't been this way when she had first arrived. But that had changed very quickly. Layouts had been shifted and optimized. The decorative plants had been removed from their place on the desk, relocated to the corners of the office. Their replacement was a neat stack of encrypted data pads, sitting adjacent to a holographic haptic interface that flickered with a constant stream of data. Right now, that data was displaying commander Shepard's vital signs... such as they were.

Instead of pulse, blood pressure, hormone levels and hundreds of other signs she had monitored in the process of reviving the man, she had been left with simple power readings, nutrient solution levels and the activity logs from the nerve connectors implanted in his spine and brain that let him interact with his new body.

Jacob had called it a salvageable victory. A man was back from the dead, lucid enough to know and remember who he was, and not in the hands of Eclipse and their employers. Miranda called it a near total disaster. Perfection had been written into her genes by her father's mad plans for a dynasty, body and mind. Drummed into her with fourteen years of the best tutelage money could buy. Those had been an asset when she had fled to Cerberus, the accomplishments she achieved as a matter of course raising her to the position of the Illusive Man's right hand and one of the few people in the galaxy to ever meet him. And they continued to be an asset. She was the perfect tool, to be used in the accomplishment of the Illusive Man's goals and no other. She held no qualms of that, tools had their uses, and the goals of Cerberus were worthy for a tool as well crafted as her. And as a perfect tool, she had been given one of his most important objectives. The consequences of failing to achieve those objectives would be more severe for that perfection, not just for her, but perhaps the whole galaxy.

And she _had _failed. Shepard's consciousness was back, but the rest of him was not. The Lazarus Project goals had been clear. Bring back commander Shepard exactly as he was, in every detail. No matter what Jacob thought about that, there was no hiding the fact that the project goals were now unachievable in their original scope. The man was a symbol. No one would believe him to be the same person now. Damn that traitor. She should have seen it coming. She refused to accept failure of course. Wilson's betrayal and subsequent liquidation meant that they would have to start all over again, but there was enough tissue samples and data from the two years of research to do so, even if they had to flash clone a body to do it. Not a true clone of course. That would mean acknowledging failure. A copy of the original body so that it could be matched to the original brain. The Illusive Man had green lighted the project, but he had also expressly forbid her from placing Shepard in cryogenic stasis in the interim. Incomplete or not, he was to be brought up to speed and acclimatized to his new situation as soon as possible. With Wilson's betrayal, they could not afford any further delays compromising their operation a second time.

From the dossiers on the man, she had expected at least some level of shock and denial at the drastic changes done to him, or at least some kind of defiance at the idea of working with Cerberus. But commander Shepard had emerged from his meeting with the Illusive Man to not just adapt, but thrive. From the surveillance feeds, she watched a corresponding spike in nerve activity as he went go through a series of combat maneuvers in the test chambers. Simulated fire from a pair of drones missed as he ducked, launching a chunk of metal debris at one with a kick while a short burst from his autocannon knocked the other out of the sky. There was no avoiding the limitations of the decade old design, but she couldn't deny the grace and coordination he had already acquired in the space of a week, pushing the machine far beyond what it had been originally designed for. Cerberus biotechnology and machine specialists observed him around the clock, performing adjustments and upgrades to his body as the rehabilitation process continued. Changes that he agreed to without hesitation. Some of them he even requested. That was another surprise. Of course he had the Illusive Man's personal assurances that there would be no control chip or override, despite her strenuous objections, regardless of whether he chose to cooperate or not, but was Shepard that easily trusting?

Still, it seemed that the commander had accepted his condition far quicker than she had imagined, and was doing everything he could do to improve on it. The other day, Jacob had wryly remarked that Shepard's vocabulary had progressed beyond one and three word answers. The words were still flat and emotionless of course, there was only so much a mech's text parser could do, but it was a start. She just couldn't help thinking that they were going around this the wrong way. The backup plan was a temporary solution at best. Thaddeus and his machine interface team had recommended that it be carried out for no more than a few hours if it ever became necessary to reactivate Shepard's brain before his body was fit for action. He had mentioned that the technology could be refined on, allowing for long term habitation in the mech shell and even allowing seamless transplants if given time and resources, but Thaddeus and his team were very much dead at the moment. The specialists they had remaining would continue the work, but the longer they let this go on, the greater the chance that Shepard would suffer some permanent psychological damage from this change. That would have been far more damaging to Lazarus project goals, and beyond, than any betrayal.

A knock sounded on the door to her office and slid open to reveal Jacob. The former security chief entered when she waved him in, flicking an eye to her console display and stacked data pads. "Still can't get over it huh?"

"Perceptive today aren't you?" She asked with a frosty edge. "I was the one overseeing Lazarus Project Jacob, and everything went wrong under my command. An entire station lost, billions of credits we poured into a dead man wasted, and the most skilled biotechnology specialists we could get dead. What didn't go wrong?"

Jacob wasn't one to be put off easily she had to admit. The man simply looked at her evenly and crossed her hand. "Come on Miranda, it's not that bad. The body's a loss, but Shepard's alive and well. His memory checks out just fine, and if those drills are any indication, I'd say he's taking his new body better than you are."

"Dammit Jacob, that's not the point. Project Lazarus was supposed to bring Shepard back exactly as he was. He's more than just a soldier and the experience he had fighting the Reapers. He's a bloody icon. Who is going to believe that thing over there is the the man who saved the Citadel and Council from a Reaper?" The Cerberus officer pointed at the surveillance feed on her console. Two years of growing back a dessicated corpse, a great part of it spent focusing on everything neck up. Most of a body was easy to repair, but the details were harder, and almost everything lay on the face, eyes and the mind behind them. Everybody, including Shepard, had to believe that this was the real deal, and not some cleverly made up copy, even if that meant leaving the small imperfections nature had given the spacer practically untouched. Mouth a little too wide, eyes too deep set, nose too flat. If her orders had not been quite so exact, she could have perfected on what nature had begun with. Not that it mattered anyway. All that effort, up in smoke. "We were supposed to bring back a hero and a legend Jacob, someone the galaxy could rally around. Not a bloody brain in a box. God, we spent two years trying to bring him back, and now we're back where we started. The galaxy can't afford the delay thanks to this screw up."

"Come on. It's not your fault Miranda. Wilson was with Cerberus for years. Longer than I ever was. Nobody could have seen it coming."

She sniffed disdainfully at Jacob's excuse. "I was in charge of the project Jacob. I knew something could have happened, that's why we had the backup plan. But it was just a temporary measure if we had to get him up before the rest of his body was ready, not for him to get acclimatized to. I just should have seen the signs, realized who the traitor was sooner. I didn't, and it's my bloody fault."

Jacob raised an eyebrow. "Why, was mind reading one of the things written into your genes? Didn't know they could do that. Did they put in lightning throwing too?" He crossed his arms at Miranda's peeved expression. "Look, I know it's a sore point with you Miranda, but all that genetic engineering, it doesn't make you all powerful or all knowing. Better specced than the rest of us for certain, but you can't predict everything that will happen. If you could, we wouldn't have had the problem with Eden Prime. When things do go wrong, you've got to keep the bigger picture in mind so you can plan around it."

"Do you think I haven't?" Miranda's voice took on an irritated edge. "I've looked through the dossiers, considered every angle, I watched this man go from dessicated corpse to living person. I know what he can and can't do, and right now, he can't do half the things we brought him back for. Everything hinged on that."

"And he knows that." Jacob shook his head. "Come on Miranda, you don't let a setback stop you, and neither does commander Shepard." He gestured at the surveillance footage, where Shepard had finished one combat simulation and was already starting up another one, this time with twice as many combat drones as before. Did the man ever rest? "The way I see it, he's making up for lost time in a real hurry. He may not trust us yet, but when he does, I'd say we won't have to worry much about what he can't do."

* * *

"Shepard, I'm pleased to see your rehabilitation is going along smoothly."

Rehabilitation. Watching the Illusive Man's back Shepard thought it an interesting way to term the last eight days of retraining. He didn't get out of breath, or have to contend with muscle aches and bruises from when he pushed his body too far. Getting used to his new gait, mass and size had helped the most in adapting to this body, and he could direct it now with the instinctive ease he had commanded when it was flesh and blood instead of nano-weave carbon armor alloy and optical fibers. Running was no longer a futile exercise in collision avoidance, as was jumping. The most he ever felt from his exertions was a mildly uncomfortable buzz that went away just by shutting off the optic feeds, a new trick he had learned, for a few minutes.

Everything seemed so effortless, and small. He had never been a particularly large man in his life, easily topped by half the marines in his old squad. In this life, people tall and short were puny set aside his new form, and anyone wanting to meet his gaze had to crane their necks skyward. Even the mech's text parser had been replaced, and he could speak full sentences instead of a handful of words, though there was no helping the flat booming voice. But more than that, he had a military grade omni-tool incorporated into his body now. Controlling the aptly named device was no longer a matter of dancing figures on holographic buttons but focused thoughts, allowing him to remotely hack devices or fabricate special munitions from a carried store of omni-gel with equal facility. Of course it had other functions that he had surreptitiously installed. The first of them, a suite of deep scan devices, he used on himself while hidden in a sensor obscuring dust storm he had created during the training exercises. Learning that he really had a brain from those deep medical scans, instead of just being a piece of silicon hardware thinking that it was the real thing, had helped lift his mood tremendously.

Of course there were downsides as well. Getting used to the raw strength of the machine's artificial musculature was also much harder than he had imagined. The less said about the egg test, the better. Along with smallness, the world in his eyes had gained an unpleasant propensity for being... squishy. And he had concerns about the examinations of Cerberus bio-technicians and machine specialists, how do you trust an organization like Cerberus, but he had relented upon realizing the alternative was being left unable to even repair battlefield damage. Communication with the outside world was, naturally, impossible. The reasons had been logical enough. Someone with a lot of money wanted him dead, and had nearly succeeded. Outside communications before he was back at full capacity gave them a chance to get it right this time. All the same, he missed having familiar faces to talk to. He wasn't on a Cerberus station to make friends.

"THIS IS NOT THE REASON FOR COMMUNICATIONS"

"No, it's not." The Illusive Man turned around to face Shepard, his hands surprisingly bereft of either cigarette and alcohol. "It's the Reapers. I think we have them this time."

Mention of the Reapers instantly bought Shepard's full attention. In the days following his awakening, every spare moment not spent in rehabilitation had been taken by the data Cerberus had gathered on the colony attacks. It hadn't been much, but the Illusive Man's assertion that it couldn't be slavers was right. The scale of the attacks made it impossible for any of the groups in the outlaw Terminus regions to have had a hand in this. And not one of the colonies had shown any sign of resistance that would have followed a slaver or pirate attack. The evidence did point towards the Reapers, they were the only ones capable of pulling it off, but he hadn't been certain yet. Only the results and the lack of evidence pointed to them. What was different this time...

"A COLONY HAS BEEN ATTACKED"

The head of Cerberus didn't answer straight away, picking up a smoldering cigarette from the ashtray on his desk. "Freedom's Progress" he puffed, "has gone silent. A routine communications query turned up nothing but static. Attempts at establishing communications with the colony have failed. It has all the signs of being the latest abduction Shepard. This may be the break we were looking for. I have a shuttle already waiting to take you there. Miranda and Jacob will give you your briefing on the way."

Shepard nodded, turning away from the projection when the Illusive Man's next words stopped him in his tracks.

"For the time being, Miranda will be in command of this operation."

He turned back, facing down the Illusive Man with all the incredulity he could muster with his unblinking optics. A Cerberus officer in command? He could think of a thousand reasons to reject it. Least of all it would mean he wasn't working with Cerberus, but for them. Some would argue that it was a fine distinction, but they became planet sized once command decisions came to play.

"NO"

"I had thought you might feel this way. To be honest, if project Lazarus had succeeded in all its goals, I would have had left command of the operation to you." Taking another pull on his cigarette, the man waved his other hand in a dismissive gesture. "But it didn't, and your recovery has been impartial at best. As impressive as your recovery has been, there are a lot of limits on what you can do in your current state. Miranda is a skilled tactician and capable operations commander. Between the two of you, you should be able to get this job done."

It was almost like being back under Ambassador Udina's ass covering complaints, damn the man with his barbs.

"I REMEMBER AKUZE"

He frowned. "Yes, I suppose that would give you a negative impression of any Cerberus command."

Negative impression? Luring thresher maws to feed on an entire colony, having the damned worms lying in wait for his company of marines to arrive, only to have them eaten right before him in order to test their combat training was a _**negative impression**_? He admired the man's sense of understatement. He also wanted to grind him into a fine paste. Was the man deliberately trying to provoke him? Marine training won out over his anger, and he stood there waiting for the Cerberus head to continue.

"The sacrifices were necessary Shepard. Without the data gained from the thresher maw attacks, humanity would have suffered greater losses than a single colony had it continued to expand ignorant of the threat. Your experience on that colony became the foundation of Alliance protocols for detecting and dealing with thresher maws. I hope you can understand the necessity of that and put it behind you. But I assure you, the likelihood of such events repeating themselves in this operation are nonexistent. Miranda is quite competent and as one of my finest officers, she has always achieved her goals with an absolute minimum of incidents."

"LAZARUS PROJECT"

Shepard only stared at the him for a moment, his anger cooling to sub zero temperatures. Akuze wasn't something he was going to forget anytime soon, whatever the reasons. He knew about the protocols. He wrote them after all. But to get this... sacrificing men was one thing, but this was beyond the pale. But he could see that argument would hold no sway. He didn't particularly blame Miranda for the failure of the Lazarus project, but he judged it the most likely reason the Illusive Man would accept. The two of them regarded each other, an instinct telling him that the Illusive Man was testing him, wanting to see how far he would bend in this. He had a good control over how he displayed his emotions, forged in training, tempered in battle and beyond. Being brought back in a body incapable of blinking and facial characteristics had only enhanced that aspect of himself. But the man in front of him was every bit his equal, returning the stare with an impassive face.

"Humanity doesn't have many options at this point, you understand." He broke the silence by outlining his limited his choices. Shepard thought it a weak gambit.

"THE ALLIANCE AND COUNCIL REMAIN"

"They didn't believe you when you were alive two years ago, and being dead didn't do much to bolster your case. I assure you, the two years that followed were not kind to anyone who still believed in what you had to say about the Reapers. In your current state, do you think you'd be able to convince them now, with nothing new to add to your case?" The man sat down, picking up his drink. "To be frank, Cerberus is the best chance humanity has, and we need to maximize those chances. You took down one of the Reapers Shepard. They may not know fear, but they've got to respect that even with your current disability. The Council and Alliance won't be so easily convinced."

It was a logical choice. If the Reapers were to be stopped, they would need to be unified behind someone. Without a central leader, the Council with its incessant politics would be mired in squabbling and half measures while the Reaper fleets rolled over them as they had when Saren was still alive. A machine wouldn't be able to do that, and he was almost all machine. Few would be able to even make that distinction.

"NO"

"This is much too important to let your personal grievances interfere Shepard, you need to put them aside."

"THIS MATTER IS BEYOND PERSONAL"

Accepting Miranda's command would have been practical in the short term. She had a human body, and with it, could deal with the rest of the world on the terms accorded to them. Anyone would consider him a piece of furniture at a glance. Well armed, mobile and a voice you could grind rocks with to be sure, but furniture all the same. You don't respect furniture, or make deals with it. And you certainly don't take orders or inspiration from furniture. Under the circumstances, Miranda could fulfill that role far more easily than to him. But while he didn't know her well enough to determine what decisions she would make, he had no doubt they would be in the advancement of Cerberus goals. This man's goals.

Allowing her command over him meant setting a precedent for him following Cerberus orders. And he was not about to trust an organization as ruthless as they were to make the right call when the time came for it. Saren had been ruthless too. But he had ended up working for the Reapers, believing that it would be for the preservation of galactic life even as he worked towards it's extinction. If it came down to the hard decisions, if this man were presented a chance to work with the Reapers on the promise of preservation, could he trust this man to pick the right choice? No, he found that he couldn't.

They continued to stare at each other for a long time.

He took another long pull from his cigarette before breaking the silence. "Very well Shepard, humanity's chances would only suffer if you were to refuse cooperation so early. Miranda and Jacob will be attached to your command. I hope you understand that this acquiescence is atypical and unlikely to be repeated. Most decisions will be far too important for me to concede on."

And what decisions would those be, he wondered. It didn't matter, Shepard decided. He would be content with his small victory for now. He nodded.

"Go to Freedom's Progress, and find what you can. Find out what's happening to our colonies. Once we know, we can start taking this fight to the enemy."

The projection winked out, and Shepard turned to the exit, already formulating strategies and questions he would need to ask to get an idea of what to expect. He had been dead for two years, and everything he had worked to achieve seemingly undone by an apathetic galaxy. But two years was rest enough, and it was past time that he got to work.

Alexander Shepard was back.

* * *

Freedom's Progress was a typical human colony, large flat plains carved into the mountainous regions of the planet peppered with prefabricated structures and the occasional access gate set into the mountain face blocking off one sector from the other. The planet's slow rotational speed and distant sun combined to give the planet it's chilly clime and long periods of dimly lit night. As colonies went, it was entirely unremarkable, it's light manufacturing and mining industry just able to supplement its feeble agricultural development with imported foods. The marine garrison on the planet was light, evidenced by the small barracks they had quartered in, and the slightly larger machine shop which had housed a complement of autonomous security robots and drones. It hadn't helped protect the colony any. The mechs weren't in the machine shop, the human marines were not in their barracks, and the colonists... were nowhere to be found.

"I don't like this place. It's too quiet, even for a human colony." Prazza complained loudly, the other members of his squad nodding in agreement as the quarian commando paced around the room. "No weapons damage, no bodies, and everything shut off but the power. I say we go in and get Veetor. He can't have reprogrammed that many mechs."

"No Prazza, we wait for the scouts. I won't have our teams rushing in blindly when there are at least two heavy mechs waiting for us." Tali'Zorah vas Neema kept her irritation at the brash quarian commando from leaking into her voice. She would never speak poorly of the Admirals, but she had to wonder why they had chosen Prazza of all people to be assigned to her group. The headstrong commando would rush into venting plasma if his objective lay inside, never bothering to check his suit integrity. Poor Veetor had already been scared witless, curled up behind a cargo crate and muttering to himself, his suit homing device already disabled. And then Prazza had to run in with his entire squad. Whatever had left Veetor in that state, Prazza's approach had pushed him over the edge, sending the scared quarian into a panicked flight before locking himself in the colony's control center. That was when the mechs had woken up.

She was thankful that no one had been hurt in the sudden retreat, even a minor injury could have resulted in a suit breach and infection, but she didn't see any way around what was going to be a costly assault. The two heavy mechs they had sighted remained firmly rooted at the entrance to Veetor's shelter. Her squad had a few heavy weapons between them capable of doing the job, but she doubted they were enough to deal with both mechs without taking casualties. She had tried distracting them with Chiktikka, but her poor tech drone had not lasted five seconds before the mechs had shot it to pieces. Maybe hacking their IFFs would work. Shepard had often worked to sow chaos among the synthetics by having her scramble their IFFs with junk data rather than the more demanding control overrides, confusing the machines. Maybe... she closed her eyes for a moment in respect.

Even after all these years, thinking about her old commander made her wish she had never left the Normandy. They had parted ways not long after Saren's defeat, he to his quest to stop the Reapers once and for all, her to the ending of her pilgrimage, Geth data in hand. And then less than a month later, news had come through her private channels from Garrus. The Turian's news had shaken her to her core. The Normandy was destroyed, and Shepard, surrogate father and mentor that he had become to her, was gone forever, lost in the vacuum. Her crush had been the foolish thing of a young girl, but he was loyal, brave and kind, a bastion of protection against the rest of the galaxy, and then he was gone, just like that. Not since her mother had passed away had the universe seemed so dark and frightening. Her decision to leave had likely saved her life, but that gnawing feeling that she had abandoned them at the hour of their greatest need never went away.

"Saya, do you have those new disruptor munitions? I think we can override the gun drones and have them distract the mechs while one of us reprograms their IFFs." She still missed Shepard terribly, but she would honor his loss and the lessons he had thought her the only way she knew how, by preserving the lives of those under her the best way she could. "Prazza, your squad will- wait, do you hear that?"

It was indistinct at first, but the colony was silent save for them, and quarian ears were quick to pick up the quietest of sounds that did not belong. And then she was aware of the faint vibrations that traveled up her feet.

"Heavy mech!" Prazza's hissed warning gave voice to everyone's fears. There was a flurry of activity as the quarians doused the lights and sought whatever available cover there was in the barracks, ducking behind cabinets and weapons lockers with guns in their hands for all the good it would do them. In these close quarters, they wouldn't have much of a chance if it came to an open fight against a heavy mech. Tali herself chose to take refuge behind a large food preparation unit, fingers dancing across the omni-tool, activating as many hacking tools as she dared. All the while, one frantic question ran through her head. Had Veetor finally lost his senses?

The question was rendered moot as the door slid open and a YMIR assault mech stepped through, it's massive bulk scraping the edges of the doorway. Glowing red optics swept the room, Tali felt her breath catch when its sensor pod swept past her hiding place, the menacing firepower it held in its arms silent, but ready to deliver death at a moments notice. No one showed themselves or opened fire, and Tali dared hope that it's sensors were damaged somehow. Cautiously, she loaded up her most subtle hacking program, passively scanning the airwaves for a communications port all synthetics had. Her other hand dipped towards the shotgun resting on her back. She had just drawn it when a pair of humans slipped through the door, flanking the mech with guns at the ready. And it was not shooting at them. Tali's hacking systems remained inactive as she simply stared in surprise at the sight. Prazza however, had different ideas.

"Hold it right there!"

The room lights flared as Prazza's squad rose from their hiding places, covering the humans with their weapons. They responded in kind, leveling weapons at Prazza's squad. But before anyone could do more than blink, the mech swung an arm in front of the newcomers, blocking their line of fire but leaving it's rocket launcher aimed at Prazza.

"HOLD FIRE"

To Tali's shock, the humans complied with the mech's order, lowering their weapons slowly though they never holstered them. In sudden horror, she saw Prazza tighten his finger on the trigger of his rocket launcher. She flung out her hand, forestalling his plan. "Hold it Prazza. You agreed to let me deal with any of the colonists."

"They're not colonists, they're Cerberus" Prazza spat with contempt, but his finger slipped from the trigger. "I'm not taking chances with their operatives."

"Put those weapons down!" Tali ordered, but she darted a look back at the humans. The commando was right. She had missed it in the darkness, but with the lights back on the Cerberus symbols were clearly visible on both their uniforms. Just knowing who they were was enough to start a fire of white hot anger in her mind. Worse than their enslavement of Thorian creepers and turning colonists into Geth Husks, they had tried to attack the fleet. These were enemies of the Migrant Fleet. But enemies or not, they had not begun shooting here. That meant she had to respond in kind. Clamping down on her anger, she turned to the woman and put away her shotgun. When she spoke, it was with a very tight voice. "Why is Cerberus here?"

The reply came from the most unexpected of places.

"TALI'ZORAH IS THAT YOU"

Tali blinked. The mech's sensor pod had swung towards her, optics shifting focus as it spoke with its booming mechanical voice. How did it know her name? No, that was the wrong question. Who was speaking through the machine? Veetor? A display popped up in her helmet, showing the analysis of her communications scan. But instead of answers, she got more questions instead. The port she had detected earlier was not receiving, or sending any traffic. No one was remotely controlling the machine. That left... her hand curled in a near fist before she forced it flat. If she had been angry earlier, she was boiling with rage now. But she kept her voice level and her face still. "I am asking Cerberus, not an artificial intelligence."

The machine... laughed. It had the vocalizations of a laugh, but the flat harshness of its voice robbed any mirth it might have had, making Tali's skin crawl.

"YES THAT IS THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION. IT IS WRONG"

The mech lowered its arms, sensor pod sliding forward slightly. Prazza brought his weapon up again, but she stopped him with an outstretched hand. Letting the brash commando trigger a firefight was the last thing she wanted. Especially when faced with this... stranger. A suggestion made itself to her as to how it knew her, but she denied it. No, it couldn't possibly be. There was no way.

"WE WERE ON THE NORMANDY TOGETHER. A TEAM TO STOP SAREN"

"That's not a secret. Anyone could have found that out and programmed it into you." No no no no, she refused to believe it. Unconsciously, her hands balled into a fist and she let it stay that way. This couldn't be true. She should be feeling anger at this... this fabrication, this atrocity that taunted at old wounds. Cerberus must have looked up her past, trying to put her off balance with this farce. But a part of her did want to believe it. A hope she had let die two years ago had rekindled itself, and it was pushing her to listen. The mech paused, optics dilating as it focused on the rest of the room before sweeping back to her.

"DID THE GETH DATA I PROVIDED HELP WITH YOUR PILGRIMAGE"

She didn't want to believe it. But she couldn't stop herself from asking. No one else had known. She had to know.

"Shepard...?"

"IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN TALI"

"But how, no, you-" She was stuttering in front of her people, and she knew it, but she couldn't help herself. There was no way this machine could be Shepard, no matter what it said. But only he had known about giving her the Geth data. Cerberus couldn't know that. It couldn't be him. She had grieved his loss, accepted it in those two long years since the Normandy had been destroyed. Joker wouldn't have lied. Normandy's destruction had taken Shepard with it into the darkness of space, never to be found again. Against everything she held as true, she wanted to believe, that somehow the man she had come to respect so much and more had returned against all odds. But there was Cerberus, and this machine that claimed to be him. "You were lost in the void Shepard. Joker saw it. We all thought you were dead. If it really is you, how is this possible?"

"And why is your old commander working for Cerberus?" Prazza's voice over the encrypted channel interjected.

She remained silent, dreading the answer.

For a moment, the machine's illuminated optics dimmed as if taking a breath, and then brightened again. "I WAS DEAD TALI. CERBERUS BROUGHT BACK WHAT THEY COULD."

The Cerberus woman's eyes looked aside at the announcement and frowned, but Tali wasn't paying attention to her. Bring back the dead? She had been prepared for an answer like this, but she was barely able to conceal her shock. How could Cerberus do such a thing? She could barely imagine what it would have taken to accomplish such an impossible feat. Or the cost. How many people had Cerberus subjected to their terrible experiments to make this possible? Did Shepard even know the cost? She was only dimly aware that she was beginning to believe that it really was Shepard who stood before her, an impossibility made real.

Prazza didn't oblige her a chance to ask. "Likely story." He sneered, red painted helmet shaking with a dismissive toss of his head. "No organization would commit the resources it would take to bring back just a single soldier. This is a trick. You're not even a soldier. You're just a bosh'tet of an AI Cerberus making up cheap stories to get us to lower our guard."

Shepard's optics narrowed as they focused on Prazza. The commando flinched, sliding a hand down to his sidearm. Before it could go any further, Tali cut in. "You haven't seen Shepard in action, Prazza. If it really is him, trust me, it was money well spent." She turned back to the me- to Shepard. "If you really are Shepard, that is?" She asked, only partly feeling the doubt that lingered in her voice. She had to be certain, not just for her, but for the rest of her team. Prazza's claim had already put the nervous quarians on edge, many of them fingering their weapons in a not-quite gesture of hostility. All it would take was just one wrong move and it could still turn into a firefight they couldn't afford.

The sensor pod bobbed in an analogue of a human nod. The air around him shimmered, and then faded away, his kinetic barriers dropping. The Cerberus woman raised a hand in protest, but Shepard turned his... head around to stare at her.

"WHAT REMAINS OF ME RESIDES IN THIS SHELL. TALI MAY PERFORM A SCAN TO PROVE MY WORDS"

The woman's protest died before she spoke it, but her face was set in a disapproving frown.

A scan? Yes. Tali began to see how it could work. Her fingers moved mechanically as she called up her omni-tool, calling up the diagnostic routines necessary for a deep scan. With the barriers down, a passive and active scan could easily penetrate the armor and let her know the truth of those words. If there was a living being- if Shepard were inside, she would find out soon enough. Though the woman scowled at Tali, the dark skinned Cerberus man raised an eyebrow at her and shrugged, making way for her to approach the machine body. She took a step towards Shepard, the omni-tool glowing as it began to hum with the sound of its active sensors probing the machine before it.

Almost immediately, readings began to flood her holographic display. Power and command systems that any mech would have she shunted aside, but others she kept. Life support systems, bio-electrical signals that could only have come from a nervous system, faint magnetic fields that could indicated a- keelah, how could anyone do this? She was no expert on human physiology, but she knew enough to recognize the brain and attendant spine appearing on her display, encased within a hard shell of cybernetics. Thousands of electrodes pierced the organ, giving it the appearance of bristles. How could anyone survive such a process with their sanity intact? No, not just anyone. He knew things that no one else could. How could Shepard have survived and remained sane?

No. She took a breath, calming herself. A human lay inside the machine, a man who had memories that no other person but Shepard could have. Yet she couldn't really prove it really was him. Other alternatives suggested themselves, but to openly admit them in the presence of the jumpy marines was to invite disaster. More than that, he had lowered his shields, knowing full well that she could do more than simply scan him at this distance. Without the protective screens and active security links that any mech had, she could have fried every electronic component inside and turned the interred brain into a boiling mass of protein with any of the attack programs and broad spectrum radiation emitters she had built into her omni-tool. All before anyone could stop her. Would anyone else but Shepard, a man who had trusted her with his life before, take such an insane risk? She didn't want to believe it. "It... really is you." She admitted at last. She told herself it was not an outright lie.

He did not reply to that, save only to bob his head. The other quarians did not put away their weapons, but they were not fingering them as nervously as they were earlier. The crisis had past. Even among the traditionally insular quarians, Shepard's reputation was well known, even if he was inhabiting a machine's body now. Prazza was not so easily convinced, but he only snorted in disbelief rather than voice another denial. As much as she wanted to, she couldn't berate him for it. She wanted to, she did believe. But there was still enough doubt that she couldn't entirely. But for this one time, she could believe it was him.

"But... why are you here?"

"HUMAN COLONIES ARE DISAPPEARING. I AM HERE TO INVESTIGATE"

Unspoken between the words was that it was only through Cerberus involvement that Shepard was here, and that it was their interests that had brought to this planet. For bringing him back, Tali could have thanked them. For all that they had done before, and for doing this to him, she would have blown them up ten times over. Secretly, she hoped that was his plan as well.

"WHY ARE YOU HERE"

Tali darted a look at her squad, finding most of their gazes on her. It wasn't a secret, but she could tell they didn't like the idea of letting outsiders know of any quarian problem. She went ahead anyway. It was Shepard, the one person in the whole galaxy outside of the quarians who had done so much for her. If she couldn't trust him, who could she trust? "We're looking for a young quarian named Veetor, he was here on his Pilgrimage when we picked up a distress beacon from his suit."

"IT IS UNUSUAL FOR QUARIANS TO VISIT HUMAN COLONIES"

"Quarians are free to choose where to go in their Pilgrimage, but we aren't welcomed on most planets. Human colonies, especially small ones, tend to be more accepting and Veetor was.... nervous around large crowds." She remembered the young quarian, barely old enough to go for his pilgrimage, yet eager to get away. In the crowded conditions of the Migrant fleet, the shy Veetor had always tried to find an unused corner where he could remain quiet out of sight, though he would never refuse a request to help.

"HAVE YOU FOUND HIM"

Now she shifted on one foot to the other. "We did. But when he saw us landing, he hid in a warehouse on the far side of the settlement. We think whatever happened here made it... difficult for him to recognize us."

Prazza snorted, crossing his arms as he interjected. "What she means is that he's unstable. Combined with damage to his CO2 scrubbers and an infection from an open air exposure, Veetor's not just unstable but likely delirious. He's overwritten the colony mechs to shoot everything that moves."

Both Cerberus soldiers looked at one another. "Sounds like this Veetor may know something about what happened here." The man said.

"AGREED. TALI WE SHOULD WORK TOGETHER TO FIND VEETOR"

Work together with Cerberus, she thought. But this was Commander Shepard who had made the offer, a man she trusted with her life once before and would do so again. Even if he was... changed, he couldn't have abandoned that part of him, could he? The man who had taught her, had led by example, never to abandon a chance to gain allies was making an offer once again. Besides, she couldn't turn away the help he could provide in preserving the lives of her squad for the inevitable assault. "Good idea. We'll need two teams to get past the drones, anyway."

"Now we're working for Cerberus?!"

Prazza's outburst wasn't unexpected, but this time Tali was prepared for it. Relishing the chance, she turned on the commando and let every gram of her disdain carry in her reply. "No Prazza, you're working for _me_. If you can't follow orders, go wait on the ship." He backed down, scowling strong enough that it showed through the near opaque faceplate of his envirosuit. She turned back towards Shepard. "Head for the warehouse through the center of the colony. We'll circle around on the far side to draw some off the drones and clear you a path."

"WE WILL REMAIN IN RADIO CONTACT"

"Will do. Good luck, Shepard." She turned away, leading her squad towards the building exit, but paused long enough to say the one thing that needed to be said. "Whatever happens.... it is good to have you back."

* * *

It was good to see Tali. Even if it had to be from behind the targeting optics of his new body. A familiar face, if concealed by environmental suit, was a welcome sight compared to the unknown factors that Cerberus soldiers were. He only hoped that the feeling had been mutual, foolish as that had been. Their meeting had panned out as as best as he could have hoped, once he realized who commanded the quarian strike team. Seeing him in the company of Cerberus handlers despite what the Illusive Man said about him being in command, and as a machine rather than the man he had been? Even his own mother would have trouble believing that it really was him. But Tali had believed, in the end, though the doubt and hesitation in her voice hadn't really gone away. Even if he was still the same Shepard she had known, he was with Cerberus now, and that was condemnation enough. But she would not argue the point while they had a job to do, and she trusted him enough to have her teams work with his.

Of course that hadn't worked out like they had hoped, not much of a surprise there. It didn't take a trained psychologist with an impressive doctorate to see the cracks in Tali's squad. She was in charge, but not all of the quarian marines liked the idea, Prazza especially. There were only two reasons why a soldier would cause trouble, disobeying their commander openly like that. Tali was too levelheaded to be one of them. He had thought quarian military doctrine would train their soldiers better than that. Miranda had predicted a break in her command would happen quite soon, and events had shown the accuracy of her words.

Crunching on the snow covered ground, Shepard walked across the elevated walkways of Freedom's Progress, if with some difficulty. Solidly constructed from steel plates, they still groaned in protest as his bulk pressed down on them, making enough noise to wake the dead and making him wonder if they would support his weight. His shoulders and sensor pod bore more than several streaks where paint had been scraped off by doorways too narrow or roofs too low to accommodate his size, sometimes forcing him to squeeze his way through with brute force where necessary. If Freedom's Progress was ever recolonized, the colonists would have a lot of distorted walls and roofs to contend with. But for all the delays it had meant, they were making good speed, crossing through the colony in a matter of minutes.

They were taking the other access route to where the missing Veetor was apparently holed up. Across a deep pit, a pair of autonomous gun drones crested the ridge, zipping by on element zero drive cores as they headed for an overhanging roof. They never made it. A short burst of fire from his autocannon dropped their shields and the barking of heavy pistols from the two Cerberus soldiers in his squad punched out their cores. Eyes for the Illusive Man they may be, but he had been right about their capabilities as soldiers. Flight systems destroyed, the drones plummeted into the chasm where they detonated in a cloud of twisted metal. Never slowing down, Shepard took a turn on the walkway, quickly descending to the open air cargo area.

"How did they think they were going to get away? We're not that far behind, and there's no way they'll be able to land a ship here." Jacob's voice called from behind as he brought up the rear, swapping his pistol for the shotgun that rested on the small of his back.

Hopping over the stairwell railing, Miranda's fingers flicked an pulse mine into an unfolding drone, shorting out it's shields in a flare of excess electrical energy. Her pistol barked, and the mech's head exploded, lightning wreathed body crumpling to the ground. "That's an academic question at this point Jacob. We can wonder what their escape plans were after we secure the quarian."

Easier said than done.

Their target had locked himself up in a secure room and overwritten the colony's complement of army mechs to kill everything else. According to earlier reconnaissance from Tali's group, that meant wading through at least a dozen LOKI light security mechs and a pair of YMIR class assault platforms, mechs similar to his body but lacking an organic brain or software intelligence. Shepard's part in the plan was to provide the quarians with much needed fire support when the time came to bring down the defenses their missing quarian had set up. But some of them weren't about to wait for him to show up before they whisked Veetor away. Any other time, he wouldn't have minded. But the quarian was a witness to what had happened here, and he wouldn't let the clues slip through his fingers- gun sheathes, not when he could help it. He couldn't blame them for wanting to breaking the deal. Nobody trusted Cerberus, even if they had grudgingly agreed to their brief alliance at Tali's insistence. Combined with the aggressive wariness of that commando, he wasn't surprised when Tali's frustrated voice crackled over the radio, telling him that the Prazza's team were trying to leave him empty handed.

Of course they were paying for it now. His new body had as many gifts at it had costs, and his military grade auditory sensors were picking up the sounds of battle too muffled to be heard by human ears. Sporadic rifle and small arms fire in the distance told him that the quarians were engaging the mechs. The deep-throated roar of more than one autocannon also said that they were taking a beating. Placing himself in front of the access gate, he switched open his command circuit, turning the sensor pod to look at them.

_"PREPARE FOR BREACH. PROVIDE COVER AND FOCUS ON LOKI UNITS."_

Jacob hefted his shotgun, taking cover behind a retaining wall while Miranda sidled up to the access gate, pistol in one hand, a pulse mine in the other. She directed a raised eyebrow at him, subvocalizing her next words over the communications channel. _"What about the heavy mechs?"_

_"I WILL DEAL WITH THEM"_

The disapproving frown and shake of her head happened as he imagined it would. One of the first things Miranda had told him when he had begun those rehabilitation simulations was that his body was not as well armored as its virtual intelligence controlled analogues. A brain and life support systems being larger than any micro-circuitry, the least important parts had to go first to make room, which meant stripping or lightening non-critical armor plates. Going head to head against two fully armored platforms of the same class range as he would only result in... less than optimal results she had called it. But it was his command, and there was no turning back now.

He turned the sensor pod back to the gate, going through the plan in his mind once more. It would have been both suicidal and stupid in his flesh and blood body. There were better ways dealing with heavily armed opposition than what he had now, drummed in by marine training and sharpened with years of experience. Flanking tactics, mobile fire, and cover were all good parts of the marine training package. Dying and coming back as he was now had made those tactics obsolete, changed the rules. He dwarfed almost all the cover he could have been expected to use as a marine. He'd come up with new tactics since his rebirth, for every enemy he could imagine fighting on foot, tested them in simulated fights and exercises. Of course it was still suicidal and stupid if you sat and thought about it in dry terms like armor weight and firepower. But now he had to test them for real. The microfusion plant in his chest hummed with power, the heart analogue increasing power output as he prepared his body for what came next.

_"WE ARE IN POSITION TALI"_

Her response over the communications channel was accompanied by the growling of the gate motor. _"I'm opening the gate now. Hurry, they're tearing the team apart." _

"Well, they did want to go ahead of us." Miranda's off hand remark held more than a little smug satisfaction, but she was wise enough to keep it off the communication channels.

_"And Shepard... see you on the other side._"

He stepped through the gate into a storm of fire. LOKI light security mechs and YMIR assault platforms dominated the warehousing area, their weapons twinkling with a deadly staccato. With already half their number messily dead, the remaining four members of the quarian strike team were falling back, their lines starting to crumble despite dogged resistance. Most of their fire was focused on the assault platforms, but smashed harmlessly against their reinforced shields. In stark contrast, the mechs were advancing as a unified group, light mechs sweeping ahead as they methodically harried the quarians from one clutch of cover to the other while the assault platforms blasted apart holdouts with heavy fire. A commando rose from behind a pile of rubble to fire the rocket launcher in his hands, but was immediately cut to ribbons by autocannon fire. Another dove to grab the weapon, but a burst of fire knocked her to the ground. A round struck her in the head when she tried to crawl away, and she fell still. Tali was nowhere to be seen, but the battle hid too many possible corpses.

Servos whining, Shepard began accelerating into the fray with one command to his squad.

_"ENGAGE AND DESTROY"_

Miranda's reply came in the form of a telltale blue aura surrounding her hand, followed by a LOKI's head suddenly compacting as it exploded in a shower of sparks. Jacob's shotgun boomed, the pellets doing little damage at this range, but immediately gaining the attention of a half dozen light mechs and one of the assault platforms. They immediately turned towards them, breaking off from the main force and advancing on their position while the rest continued harrying the quarian team. Tracer fire chased Jacob as he dived behind a prefab building, cursing as the rounds punched through thin steel sheets in an attempt to find him.

The fire abruptly faltered when Shepard's rocket struck the assault platform square in the chest, fragments scything down nearby light mechs while the YMIRs kinetic barriers flickered unsteadily. Multiple sets of optics swiveled, and then his barriers began flickering under a hail of retaliatory fire. Warning alerts blared in his mind as the firestorm ate away at his shields, but he continued accelerating, rapidly closing the distance to the leading assault platform as the flanking LOKI's scattered. One light mech was too slow and his charging bulk battered the machine away like a broken doll.

More shots rang out behind him, and Jacob's shotgun boomed once more, LOKI mechs falling with torsos ripped open or shattered legs. In front of him, the YMIR's rocket launcher aligned with his chest.

_"Commander!"_

And then he was inside its reach. One arm lashed out, protective weapons sheathe clamping on the elbow of the YMIR's rocket launcher and driving it into the air where it discharged its weapon harmlessly. Stepping into its side, Shepard drove the other arm into a break in its torso armor, tearing through weaker plating with brute force. His autocannon roared, kinetic barriers unable to protect against point blank shots, electrical cables and artificial muscles exploding under his assault. The machine droned warnings as he tore into its power core, optics flickering as vital control circuits vaporized under an incandescent hail of fire. The mech instantly stopped resisting, it's last drone ending in a dying squeal, body sagging lifelessly to the ground. Releasing the arm, he pivoted, directing the rocket launcher towards the pair of LOKI mechs approaching his side. Hot exhaust washed over him as the rocket screamed into their midst, the explosion shredding their lightly armored bodies.

_"Incoming, two o clock low!"_

Shepard reacted instantly. Air crackled as superconductive capacitors discharged their load, flash heated spinal myomer bundles instantly contracting under the sudden electrical burst. The dead mech in his grip whirled as his torso spun with the sudden kinetic impulse. A split second later, the incoming rocket slammed into the machine's back, blasting open armor plate and tearing off its arms. Hydraulic stress alerts sounded in his head as the impact sent the mech sagging forward into his arm, limbless joints arcing with electricity. Small arms fire quickly followed, flechettes spanging off twisted armor or burying themselves in the gutted machine's back. The remaining mechs had finally decided he was the bigger threat.

He walked into their fire, holding the dead mech ahead like a shield. Supporting fire from behind whittled at the remaining LOKIs, but the stuttering roar of the remaining YMIR began to pick up, jerking the battered torso in his grip to it's tempo of destruction.

_"Get into cover Shepard! You can't hold out like this."_

Miranda's warning was lost as a distinct high pitched alarm screamed in his auditory sensors. The dead mech's microfusion containment system was failing. That wasn't in the plan.

Momentary panic became inspiration. Instead of tearing off the doomed carcass in his grip, he drove his other arm into the break in it's armor and applied pressure. Tortured steel squealed as it gave way, the bottom half of the assault platform falling away in a shower of sparks. Accelerating once more into the hail of fire, Shepard pivoted to the right, holding the impaled torso behind him and exposing his body to the full fury of the YMIR's autocannon. His shields collapsed instantly, alerts blaring with damage reports to his glacis plate and motive systems as a merciless hail of flechettes chewed away at his armor.

_"What are you doing Shepard?! This is sui-"_

The capacitors fired again, kinetic impulse sharply swinging his torso the other way, mech carcass in his grip arcing towards the remaining YMIR. Shepard jettisoned the gun sheathes. Freed from his mass, momentum took over. Gun sheathe and impaled torso were sent flying towards his intended target. It's flight terminated against a hapless LOKI, pulverizing the mech as it bounced once on the snow covered ground to land before the assault platform. A sliver of panic shot through him, had he-

Blinding white light overloaded his sensors as the dead mech's reactor containment systems catastrophically failed. Multiple impact direction warnings simultaneously ceased as luminosity filters deployed, restoring vision in time for Shepard to catch the afterimages of a blue white ball of light dissipating in the air, a perfectly shaped crater ten feet across at its epicenter. The LOKI mechs were gone, blackened husks baked into the ground, and even the YMIR assault platform had been staggered back, paint and chest plate boiled away in the flash of superheated plasma. But it wasn't dead yet, it's optics flickering back to life, weapon arms twitching as it tried to bring them to bear on him.

But he was no longer where it was aiming. Three hundred twenty kilos of armored foot struck the machine's right knee perpendicular to its rotational angle, snapping the joint like a dry twig. Robbed of its balance, the mech tumbled face down into the snow, still trying to rise when Shepard's other foot came down on its head. Metal groaned and warped as its optics cracked under his weight. The remaining leg and it's arms methodically dug at the snow, finding purchase and exerting pressure. Shepard lifted his foot... and drove it down hard. With a squeal and shower of sparks, the assault platform's head exploded like an overripe fruit, and it's struggle came to an end.

The silence that descended immediately was almost overwhelming in its familiarity. Shepard lifted his sensor pod, sweeping the battlefield for something that had gone wrong. For once, nothing had. A quarian was peeking from cover, as if unsure if the battle was over. The other survivors were too lost in their own wounds to care. Jacob and Miranda had left their positions, weapons still clutched but pointed down as they approached him, wary, almost uncertain expressions on their faces. That confused him until he realized that his body paint had been scorched black by the same blast, rendering it unrecognizable. That explained a lot. He lowered his arms and responded the best way he knew how.

"ALL TARGETS TERMINATED"

A ghost of a smirk passed by Miranda's face and Jacob actually grinned. "Yeah, I suppose you could say that."

"CHECK THE WOUNDED"

Miranda opened her mouth to object when a voice cut her off. "I'll look after them Shepard, you go find Veetor."

Heads turned to find Tali crouched by one of the fallen commando's, the elaborate blue patterns on her envorsuit distinguishing her from the other quarians who were seeing to the fallen. Her omni tool glowed with medical status updates as she applied medigel and sealant patches to her comrade's wounds.

"ARE YOU UNHARMED TALI"

The young quarian shook her head. "I am thanks to you, but the rest of the team..." she trailed off with a sigh, pressing a sealant patch down on a wound with a bit too much pressure. The quarian groaned and Tali clasped her hand. "Bear with it Saya, the pain will pass. Shepard... this shouldn't have happened."

"And yet it did." Miranda spoke softly to no one in particular, her voice just hinting at smugness. "I did warn you about the risks of our collaboration commander."

Tali didn't turn away from her ministrations, but her voice grew testy. "Prazza was an idiot. If he's still alive, the Admiralty Board will see to it that he's properly dealt with."

"I'm sure they will" Miranda's murmured rebuttal carried volumes about what she thought of the idea, but Shepard wasn't listening. Optics scanned, and rescanned the battlefield, methodically observing each quarian, living and dead. The casualty count was bad. Of the twelve commando's who had comprised Tali's squad, more than half their number lay quite dead. Half again that number in the survivors were down with wounds that would might have been barely survivable for humans in a well stocked hospital, but fatal for the quarian's with their weak immune systems. He didn't know how they would seal the suit breaches before infection took off the worst hit ones. The question was concerning, but what Tali had said took most of his attention. He scanned the remaining quarians again, looking for a specific red painted envirosuit and finding nothing.

"WHERE IS PRAZZA"

* * *

"Monsters coming back. Mechs will protect. Safe from swarms. Mechs will keep safe."

"Come on you bosh'tet, stop staring at the monitors. We need to go now!"

Prazza hissed at the babbling Veetor, darting a look back at the door. They were shorted out from when he had forced his way in, and wouldn't stop anyone from walking in now. He had found Veetor in front of the security monitors, observing data feeds from the colony security networks and feverishly loading new algorithms into the system. The quarian had been oblivious to everything else, including Prazza's entry and the pitched battle taking place outside. Grunting in disgust, he shouldered his rifle, reaching out to give the babbling fellow a good shake. "We didn't have time to waste on your delirium. The Cerberus operatives are going to be here soon."

Veetor continued to ignore him, fingers not stopping in their dance across the display controls. "No-no-no-no. Not safe. Must hide. Mechs will protect."

He was about to give the delirious quarian more than a good shake when the security doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. Prazza spun, leveling the rifle at the door as a YMIR mech filled the doorway, bone white armor scorched black. Unblinking red optics glared at him, autocannon leveled at his chest.

"GOING SOMEWHERE PRAZZA"

"You!" Prazza's rifle instantly leveled with the optics, but he didn't pull the trigger. The autocannon didn't budge a millimeter. Shadows flitted behind the mech, and he caught the glint of a pistol. Prazza's weapon remained centered on the mech. "Not a step closer."

The mech didn't answer, at least not in words. Flimsy prefab walls groaned as the mech forced it's way through the too small doorway, metal plates buckling to the sound of popping bolts. With a groan, the entire doorway fell inwards and the mech stepped back. The dust had barely settled when Tali bounded through the open doorway at a sprint, shotgun in hand. Prazza had barely recognized her before the butt of her shotgun slammed hard into his stomach. The commando doubled over, his rifle dipping to the floor when Tali followed by planting a foot behind his leg and knocking him to the ground with a sweep.

"Prazza you idiot, what are you doing?" Tali yelled at the fallen marine, knocking the rifle out of his hand with a kick. "You get most of your team killed with your foolishness and now you want to start a fight with Shepard? Are you trying to kill yourself?"

"You can't trust them!" Prazza gasped defiantly between breaths. "They may have fooled you with an AI, but I'm Fleet Marines. They'll just take Veetor away."

Shepard stepped into the room, already deformed metal plates creaking under his weight. Miranda and Jacob darted into the room, weapons down but ready. Seeing Prazza on the floor, they put them away. Miranda smirked but remained silent. Jacob on the other hand, scowled at the quarian. "After that stunt you pulled, I'm not sure we shouldn't."

"You see!" Prazza shouted triumphantly. "The Admiralty will see that this was the right choice."

Tali silenced him with a finger. "The Admiralty will see you charged for disobeying orders and mutiny if you keep this up you bosh'tet. Now get out of here and see to your men before I beat you with my shotgun so hard you'll wish I had shot you instead." Prazza scrambled to his feet and fled. Nodding as the commando left the room, she stepped up to their lost quarian, putting a hand to his shoulder. He remained as oblivious to the limb as he had to their entire exchange, fingers still feverishly loading line after line of commands into the security system. "Veetor? You can stop, it's safe now. We're here to take you home."

"No Veetor here. Not safe here, not safe anywhere. Swarms everywhere. No-no-no-no. Have to hide. Swarms can't find. No monsters. No swarms. Mechs will protect."

Jacob grimaced. "I don't think he can hear anyone. Must be post traumatic shock, can't get a handle on anything outside of whatever happened to him. Saw the like on Eden Prime after the Geth hit it. I doubt we'll be able to get any useful intel out of him."

Shepard didn't disagree with Jacob's initial assessment, but they needed that information. Optics flicked between Veetor and the display monitors. An idea began to form. A mental nudge brought his communications array to life, a second configured them to broadcast a wide area low energy pulse. The display feeds abruptly disappeared in a hail of static snow, switching to a disconnect symbol before fading. Veetor's fingers came to an abrupt halt as the monitors winked out. There was a jolt as he suddenly realized Tali's fingers on his shoulder, jerking away with a startled shout and falling to the floor.

"Veetor, calm down, no one is going to hurt you!"

Slowly, the quarian lowered his arms. "You... you're quarian." He started when his face turned towards Miranda and Jacob. "And you're human? They, they didn't take you? How did you hide? How come they didn't find you?"

Tali reached out with a hand, pulling Veetor to his feet. "Calm down Veetor. All of us just came here. You're safe now."

He pulled away from her, shaking his head. "No. No one is safe. They took the colonists. They'll take you too."

Miranda interjected by walking up to Veetor. "Who took the colonists?"

A noticeable shiver ran through the young quarian's shoulders. "The... monsters. The swarms. " Miranda frowned, but Veetor didn't seem to notice, suddenly jerking his head left and right as if looking for the monsters he had described. Shepard remained silent, but he recognized the signs. Jacob was definitely right about the post traumatic shock. Veetor was starting to shake now. "They took everyone."

Miranda might have noticed, but she pressed on. "They didn't fight back?"

He shook his head, turning back to the monitors. "You don't know. You didn't see. But I see." His fingers flew across the monitors, and they flicked back to life, not with data feeds this time, but with video footage of the colony. "I see everything."

"Looks like security footage, he must have pieced it together manually... my god." Miranda breathed.

Jacob shifted from one foot to the other. "What the hell is that?"

Swarms of insects flew everywhere, each one larger than his fist. On the walkways, pod like objects hovered in video silence, seemingly made out of fleshlike material. A transparent bubble beneath revealed a human face trapped inside, locked in immobile horror. The angle of the camera showed little of the colony, but dozens of pods were visible in the shot alone, each one filled. Alien creatures walked among the pods, carrying organic objects that could only be weapons by the way they held them. Pupil-less eyes glowed with an inscrutable yellow light as they surveyed the building, a pair of the creatures manhandling an unresisting colonist into a pod.

"I think it's a Collector."

The name rung a bell in Shepard's memory. His lessons on the sapient species of the galaxy had covered them in passing, if briefly. Enigmatic, aloof, inscrutable, possessing extremely advanced technology. But above all else, they were a loner species. Contact with their species by any other council race had been sporadic at best, their presence rare enough to be attributed as a myth by most people. Alliance databases held more concrete assertions, but not by much. An attack like this was unlike anything he had heard of before.

"WHY ARE THEY HERE"

Miranda thought about it for a moment before replying. "I don't know. They usually work through intermediaries like slavers or mercenaries. For them to be directly involved like this doesn't make sense. Not unless they're involved with the Reapers somehow. It could explain the attack on the colonies."

Jacob nodded at her assessment. "The collectors have advanced technology. Them having a weapon capable of doing something like this isn't beyond them."

"The seeker swarms." Veetor quavered, practically shaking as Tali tried to calm him down. "No one can hide. They find you. Freeze you, then the monsters take you to their ship."

Except him apparently. Shepard directed a look at Veetor, hunching down before the quarian in an attempt to appear less menacing. It didn't work. Veetor flinched, almost starting up his mechanical chant of mechs keeping him safe again before Shepard drew back. Tali shot him a look that could have been anything, but he would have bet it was a sour one.

"YOU ARE SAFE VEETOR. YOU ARE STILL HERE"

As the words sank in, Veetor's shaking began to subside. Very slowly, he looked up, actually managing to look him in the optics. "The mech... an AI?" He stepped back, fidgeting nervously.

Tali's second look was definitely sour this time. She turned back to Veetor, making placating motions with her hands. "No Veetor, trust me, it's not an AI. But how did you escape?"

The quarian seemed to calm down at her words, but he still twitched occasionally. "Swarms didn't find me. Monsters didn't know I was here."

"The Collectors aren't exactly known for being careless." Jacob shrugged, looking at Miranda. "Maybe his envirosuit prevented him from showing up on their scanners?"

She shook her head. "If that was the case, there would at least be some survivors from the previous attacks, either in security rooms or reactor spaces. More likely their sensors were configured to look for humans. Only human colonies have been hit so far. The important thing however, is what they're after. What do they hope to do with our colonists?"

"WHERE IS THE COLLECTOR SHIP"

"It flew away. But they'll be back for me. No one escapes from them!"

And that was that it seemed. Shepard would have hissed with disappointment if he was still capable of doing that. The Illusive Man had been right about the threat, if not their immediate identity. The Collectors had come, snatched the colonists and garrison of marines, and then vanished into deep space. Whatever sensor nets Freedom's Progress had would be plumbed for data of course, but the trail was cold. Tali took a sealed ampule from her pouch, sliding the neck into a suit feed on his arm. There was a mechanical click and a faint hiss of steam, the ampule contents draining as Veetor grew more relaxed. "That's not true Veetor. We're here now, and no one is taking you away."

And then Veetor surprised them all with a moment of lucidity. His omni-tool flickered to life, holographic displays of sensor logs casting an orange glow in the darkened room. "I studied them. The monsters. Recorded with my omni-tool. Lots of readings. Electromagnetic. Dark energy."

"We need to get this data to the Illusive Man. The quarian too." Miranda effected to not notice the suddenly venomous glare from Tali, speaking directly to Shepard. "We need to know what else happened here."

Tali pointed an accusatory finger at Miranda while her other hand twitched, but didn't begin drifting downwards. "Veetor is in shock! He needs treatment, not an interrogation!"

Miranda ignored her. "Their people betrayed us once already Shepard. If we let them take Veetor, we'll never get any of the intel we need."

For the briefest of moments, Shepard wondered if she thought him stupid. Her argument wasn't flawed in itself, whatever intelligence they could gather on the Collectors was worth more than a single life, and even if this one was cowed, there would be other Prazza's out there among the fleet, maybe even among the Admiralty board. Letting Veetor go with them meant putting potentially vital clues at risk. But Veetor was also in the middle of a nervous breakdown. How useful would his testimony be? And Cerberus didn't have a reputation for being gentle or understanding. He could think of no greater wedge he could drive into the trust Tali had placed in him if he let them take Veetor. Whatever happened, he didn't betray friends and shipmates, even former ones. That made his decision for him. Before it could go any further, he stepped in.

"VEETOR WILL GO WITH TALI." He didn't have a way to give his voice a tone that would brook no argument, but his bulk helped. If she didn't like it, he would see whether his command extended to summary executions. He turned to Tali. "BUT WE WILL NEED THE OMNI-TOOL DATA"

Miranda only nodded, but her body language radiated disapproval in palpable waves.

"I'm glad you're still the one giving orders Shepard. Here, you can take Veetor's omni-tool data." With a flip of her fingers, she detached the optical storage disk from Veetor's omni-tool, passing it over to Jacob who accepted with a nod. His face didn't betray much, but Shepard thought he detected a faint hint of approval in the man's countenance. Leading Veetor, Tali stepped past the two Cerberus operatives, pausing to direct a look at him. "Thank you."

"WHERE WILL YOU GO AFTER THIS"

She shook her head. "I'm sorry, I can't tell you, especially not around Cerberus. All I can say is that I'm on a mission for the Admiralty deep in Geth space."

"EXTREMELY RISKY. DANGEROUS"

"I know, but it's too important to trust to anyone else. I can't let anyone else do this in my place. Goodbye Shepard, it was good to see you again." She hesitated, and then with a stiffening of her shoulders, walked away.

"Well, I suppose we've got what we came for." Jacob broke the silence, holding up the OSD and looking at Shepard. "Shall we head back to the shuttle?"

Shepard nodded absently, choosing not to answer except to walk out the same door Tali had. As he did, a communications query tickled at the edges of his consciousness, low in broadcast power and heavily encrypted. He almost came to a stop, barely remembering to keep walking as he recognized the encryption keys. He had used them before, a lifetime ago when the Normandy was still in one piece and he hadn't died yet. They were never recorded down, committed to memory and discarded once used. A mental nudge uploaded the keys from his memory, decrypting the channel content and sending an acknowledgment by the same means. He kept it off the network he shared with Miranda and Jacob. What happened next, he didn't want them to know.

_"Shepard?"_

_"TALI_"

_"You remembered. I wasn't sure if you were really... if you did." _She covered poorly, but Shepard didn't fault her doubts._ "But Shepard...do you have any proof that you're... real?"_

He'd seen his own body, laid out on a slab and lacking a brain. That was definitive enough for him, but did he have solid proof that it was his body? _"NO"_

_"I, I see_."

The channel remained silent as he walked out into the site of the earlier battle. Aside from the blast crater and the mech bodies, it was deserted, both fallen and living quarian likely already on their way back to the ship they had came in. Only the triple toed footstep in the snow and streaks of cobalt tinted blood indicated that they were once there. He was about to close the channel when his sensors picked up another communications burst.

_"For what it's worth, I think you really are you. But your body... how can you stand it?"_

By not thinking about it, was one answer that was true. Because he didn't have a choice was also another truthful answer. It wasn't as if he had his old body to go back to. He didn't tell her either of those reasons._ "BECAUSE THE REAPERS ARE STILL A THREAT"_

_"But after?"_

_"ONE GALACTIC PROBLEM AT A TIME"_ She chuckled, though it sounded strained. In truth, he hadn't really figured out a way to stop them yet, much less defeat them.  
_  
"WOULD YOU COME WITH ME WHEN YOUR MISSION IS DONE" _The words were spoken before he could fully think about it. Of course she wouldn't. Whatever he claimed, he was still a part of Cerberus for now, and the animosity between her and them was a lot more than personal. But when she replied, it was not as negative as he feared.  
_  
"I... don't know Shepard. I can't give you an answer yet. And I might not come back from my mission."_

_"YOU WILL"  
_  
She laughed._ "I missed your confidence. When my mission is over, I'll let you know, I promise. And Shepard? Keelah'Selai."_

_

* * *

_

_A/N: Yes, I know that putting Shepard in a Geth body would have been flashier, but how would that have worked? No intact Geth has ever been taken, and slapping together a Geth shell over his brain wouldn't really have been the purpose of the backup plan anyway, since they wanted a good protective shell.__ Besides, as a machine, upgrade options can alleviate some of the restrictions he's facing.  
_


	3. Chapter 03: Fitting In

**Chapter 03: Fitting In  
**  
"Ahh, Minuteman space station, a glorified nowhere hole in the middle of the ever backwards Horse Head Nebula. Home to pirates, criminal cartels and the ever so lovely Noveria 'look out for our berserk Rachni' research corporations. What a grand view it is to take in. Yeah right." Jeff Moreau snorted, taking another pull from his drink as he looked out the station's wide windows to look at the mostly empty starfield. "Come on over to these coordinates. We have a new ship for you to test out. It's just like your old one, only better. But you can't use it yet, and no sneaking aboard!" He raised his voice in a scratchy falsetto mockery of the communications that had brought him here. "Assholes."

As assholes went, they were really nice for an organization that made a living by turning nightmares into reality. Better than the Alliance jerks who just wanted to bury everything. The old saw about failure being an orphan took a big about turn when it came to the Alliance. Most of the Normandy crew had been understanding about it. Garrus had been sore for days, but that had been because of the Commander. Still had a pole up his butt, but at least he wasn't going to beat him over the head with it, and he hadn't held the grudge long. Nobody really expected a capital ship from who knows where with beam weapons that sliced straight through armor to suddenly just appear out of nowhere and _see_ a stealth frigate without warning. But the Powers-That-Be had in their infinite wisdom appointed a paternity suit for failure, and it all landed squarely on Joker's head. The psychiatrists had locked him up for days after the interrogations were over, looking for anything to pick his bones with, maybe toss him out with a dishonorable discharge. Well, that hadn't worked out like they hoped. He'd still ended up permanently grounded though.

"See how they like getting along with second rate helmsmen." He snorted, tossing the empty soda can into a waste receptacle. The healthy flyboys from his old class had finally gotten what they wanted, contributed to it the way they murdered his accomplishments with snide little comments and needle jab gossip with the officers during his downfall. Brittle boy out of the way in the corner where they could give him the occasional condescending pat on the head, assured that their their mediocrity wouldn't be challenged by the 'wimp'.

It hadn't been long after his grounding when Cerberus showed up and made him an offer he couldn't refuse... just without the baseball bats. It didn't take much to put the hurt on the glass bones kid after all. But they hadn't called themselves Cerberus, and they didn't bring bats either. Fuchisky Orbital Concerns they had called themselves, a completely legit starship manufacturer listed in the Galaxy 500 of top conglomerates with an impressive track record longer than a dreadnought of building the fastest and twitchiest spacecraft ever. Drive our shiny new ships they'd said, find if there's a problem with them, make them better, and we'll see about fixing your legs better than before as a bonus. He didn't even need the second offer to be convinced. Flying was the only thing he ever cared about. Heck, flying _**was**_ his legs. And with the Alliance wanting to bury him rather than see him as even a single bar rated shuttle pilot, he kissed those jerks goodbye.

And it was _good_. He got to fly their latest prototypes, have his suggestions on their design taken seriously, and they hadn't asked him any questions about his past. That suited him just fine. In retrospect, he should have seen it coming, how they played him but good. Once he had gotten comfortable with the ships, the money and the power assists for his legs, they'd hit him with the big question. How would he like to fly the real hot stuff? Just a few more responsibilities other than testing their consumer line ships. Courier jobs and the like. For Cerberus that is. He'd almost balked at that, certain that the Commander would come hurtling out of deep space and trash him zombie style if he did. Unlike most people, he'd seen what Cerberus had been up to, and that made his skin crawl.

"And he would kick my ass." He muttered aloud, scuffing his boots on the floor. The Commander wasn't the sort to die easy. Sure, he had seen him get spaced in a suit that couldn't hold more than an hour of air, and then get blown up with the rest of the ship, but he was equally sure Shepard was going to show up some day and commence some unholy ass kicking. Probably starting with him. Crazy, he knew, mixed with more than a bit of denial since rescuing his ass was the only reason Shepard didn't take the first escape pod out. But Shepard had built a career on crazy. Zombie Shepard was just another flavor of his particular brand of crazy.

But he signed up anyway. Why the hell not? They were doing a lot more for him than the Alliance ever had. There was also that whole 'you can check out, but you can't ever leave' vibe they had going, but he didn't really need that to start taking Cerberus paychecks. Well, maybe it had disturbed him, just a bit. Flying was everything to him sure, but doing it for an organization like Cerberus felt like betraying the Commander and everything he'd done. But they'd thrown in another bone along with their offer, the not so subtle rumors of the colony attacks. Work with us, and you'll be a part of the effort to put a stop to this, since everyone else seems to be sitting on their thumbs. They hadn't outright said it, but they'd hinted at the Reapers being involved, which was a change, since the last time someone mentioned them seriously, they'd been vacationing on planet Denial. But if the Reapers were involved, well, that was alright then wasn't it? The Commander would have wanted to keep on fighting them until the threat was over, he even went rogue from Alliance command to do it when they were chasing Saren. So long as they didn't make him start doing the freakier things that had solidified Cerberus's reputation as nightmare fuel, he figured he was in the clear.

And they gave him back his baby. They'd rebuilt the Normandy, everything from her sleek engines to that distinctive slope cut nose crowned with twin sensor fins that no other ship in the galaxy had. Sure, she was a bit bigger than the old Normandy, and he hadn't really put her through the paces yet, but who cared about that? He was never the hero type, but saving the human colonies, his baby back, and they were asking him to helm it? It was like a dream come true. All he needed now was to actually sit behind the helm and all would be right with the universe. Except for the colonists who'd vanished in the Terminus systems, but that was why he was here.

Course Cerberus was hiding around the corner to beat him with the other shoe once he got over the experience. He kinda expected that. The Normandy was a warship, and you didn't build something like that, or get the best damn pilot there ever was to fly it, if you weren't going to toss it into some serious fire. The getting shot at part, he didn't worry much about. They didn't tell him who was going to be the captain, but his money was on some Cerberus flyboy, or flylady. Sure, he figured they were going to do something about the colony attacks, but he'd never been under a Cerberus captain before, one who was probably going to start doing things that were going to give him nightmares. With him at the helm. Which was great. Really. Jeff Moreau, AKA Joker, AKA the kid with glass bones. Wanted dead or alive for crimes against humanity. Mom and Dad would be so proud. Still, they gave him back his baby and fixed his legs so he could walk, okay maybe hobble, without having to use crutches or powered limb assists nowadays. He figured he could check out what their captain was like first. It wasn't like he could back out now anyway.

And that's why he was cooling his heels in the hallway of this middle-of-nowhere station when he could have been staring at the new Normandy hidden away in its darkened hanger bay. The captain-to-be was having a meeting with the Illusive Man in the room across the hallway, the Cerberus boss as rumor went. Best as he could figure, that meant someone with big brass on their chest, if Cerberus ever got around to handing out medals for accomplishments rather than anonymous paychecks. That was square. He didn't really see the point in having the whole prestige thing in medals anyway. It's not like you ever wore them unless you were on parade. But it was his experience that the higher you went in any organization, the bigger the asshole you got. Didn't really make a difference what kind of asshole. After his stint in the Alliance, he had seen all the kinds he figured there ever could be in the universe.

Speaking of assholes, there came one of the few exceptions on Cerberus payroll, walking down the hallway.

"I see you're waiting to get a look at your new captain." Jacob strolled up to Joker, ever present sidearm strapped to his waist, combat bodysuit pressed and shiny down to his polished boots, clean shaven and crew cut. Joker by comparison was distinctly slovenly with his rolled up shirt sleeves, wrinkled pants, not to mention his scraggly beard and mustache. Cerberus wasn't as big on uniformity as the Alliance was, but apparently Jacob was ex-Alliance marine, the sort who took the whole military spic and span thing with him when he changed jobs. Still, he was one of nice guys, for a guy who knew a thousand and one ways to fold him into a pretzel and dump the remains in a trashcan before anyone was the wiser. Jacob just lifted an eyebrow at the state of his uniform and turned to lean on the railing behind him. Yeah. Way too nice.

"Just making sure we don't get anyone... special as captain. You know, like a krogan warlord, specially one of the old school ones." He hastily added when the Cerberus operative lifted yet another eyebrow. "Would be an interesting experience, if a short lived one." He suddenly stabbed a finger out into the empty hallway, growling in a poor mimicry of a krogan's deep bass voice. "We will feast on the Salarians, wipe out the Turians and drop the Asari into the sun. Our vengeance will be complete against those who've stolen our destiny! The Krogan horde will rise again!"

Jacob just chuckled, shaking his head in bemusement. "I think that's going to be rather unlikely Moreau. You should know better than that by now."

He just waved his hands in surrender. "Yeah, yeah. Cerberus has that 'by humanity, for humanity one and all' creed, I know. It's just that I'm going to have a captain looking over my shoulders again, and I don't have any idea what he's going to be captains had a bit of a standardized thing going for them in how to act, but you guys don't really have one of those, long as you get the job done." Jacob didn't respond to that, and he fell silent for a while, thinking about whether to get another drink or wait out the silence with Jacob. In the end, he picked the third option. "I mean, Cerberus let me fly again, so that's good, but I'm a bit worried about the kind of person we'll be getting. Sure, we're supposed to be stopping the colony attacks, but who knows what this guy has in mind to achieve that? I don't know."

"Fair enough." Nodding, Jacob crossed his hands and leaned further back on the railing. "I wouldn't be here either if Cerberus didn't walk their talk about protecting humanity. Doubt we'll have much trouble with your new captain walking the talk either from what I've seen." He paused for a moment. "What if I were to say it was someone you already knew?"

"Oh come on, it's not you is it?" Panic flashed through Joker at the thought. "I mean, no offense, you're a nice guy and all, but you being a captain isn't really... wait. It's not Miranda is it?" If the idea of Jacob as captain had made him panic, that thought of the Cerberus officer placed in that role had him frozen in terror. She had the smarts for it, never doubt that for a second. But he could see that her reputation was well earned from the few encounters he had with the stone cold lady who had a mind that was like a... he couldn't even think it. She'd find out somehow and he'd never survive the reprisal. He'd be lucky to get spaced in a day, if he didn't do it himself first.

"Could have been her." A wry grin made it's way onto Jacob's face as Joker shuddered. "Almost was in fact because of some... technical difficulties. But there was a last minute change in lineup, so you'll have the commanding officer the Illusive Man originally planned for." He paused, waiting for the ex-Alliance pilot to breathe a sigh of relief before dropping his next surprise. "She'll still be attached to your unit though, as the Cerberus operations head and liaison."

"What? You..." Joker scrabbled for words, stumbling over them before throwing his hands into the air when he spotted the bemused expression on Jacob's face. "You know what? That's it, I'm done." He descended into a moody silence, grumpily wearing a hole in his boots with a steady regimen of floor scuffing. Jacob just stood there with his back to the railing, a patient expression on his face. Long minutes dragged by before Joker finally gave in. "Ok, I'll bite. Who's the captain going to be?"

An eye flicked his way before flicking back to the door where the new captain was supposed to be. "Guess you should know. Makes no difference whether it's now or a couple of minutes later." He took in a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and dropped his biggest shocker.

"Commander Shepard."

He must have looked like a fish, hanging there with his mouth open, but he couldn't help it. Shepard, alive? He wasn't going to go all 'braaaains' on them was he? Then reality asserted itself and Joker snapped his mouth shut with a click, glar daggers at Jacob. "Ha, real funny Jacob. Next you'll tell me you've gotten Saren back from the dead as a two for one deal."

"It's no joke, Moreau. Here, take a look"

He fished a datapad from a belt pouch and held it out for Joker to see. The pilot blinked. It was a human face, scarred in a lot of places with the telltale glow of cybernetics lurking under some of the deeper cuts while the skin had a dry, leathery look that could have indicated implants for burns. Tubes were plugged into the broken nose and mouth, but even with the limited view, there was no mistaking that distinctive face, square chin and all, that would have set him out among a thousand. There was a time stamp on the video, indicating it had been taken three months ago. But the man had been spaced. Nobody had shown up to make a rescue for days after the Normandy broke up. There wasn't any way he could have survived unless... very slowly, he pulled his eyes from the image. "You son of a- you guys had him all this while, didn't you?" His eyes narrowed. "And what technical difficulties?"

Jacob just shrugged. "We didn't pick him up floating in space if that's what you're thinking. Lot of people wanted the body, we just ended up being the ones who held it the longest. As for the technical difficulties..." He shifted from foot to foot, the first sign of discomfort he had ever seen in the man. "Let's just say that some people really didn't want him to wake up from his coma and we had to take a few shortcuts to get him up in time. You might have some difficulty recognizing him now."

"Facial reconstruction surgery?" Joker snorted. He didn't buy the man's story yet, but this was Shepard he was talking about. "Aw, that wouldn't change him much. The commander's got this way of talking and holding himself up that really sets him apart you know? Wouldn't change a thing if he looks a bit different."

"We'll see soon enough." Jacob replied cryptically, nodding his head towards the meeting room where the door was starting to slide open. "Just try not to panic too much."

"Why, did you guys turn him into a floating jellyfish like the Hanar?" He riposted halfheartedly, directing his attention to the opening doorway as well. "Cause, that would be really awkward and- whoah, the commander rates a security mech bodyguard now?"

A YMIR assault platform was stomping out the doorway, servos whining as its optics flicked from one corner of the hallway to the other, settling it's attention on the two of them and changing course accordingly. Joker lifted an eyebrow at Jacob, noting that unlike the bone white paint jobs most mechs had, this one was painted in the grey tones of the special forces marines, with signature single red stripe running down one shoulder. Jacob just stood there watching the mech closer with a patient look on his face. The eyebrow went even higher when the doorway slid shut with nobody else following the mech out. "You can't mean-"

"That's no bodyguard Mr Moreau" Jacob quietly answered his unspoken question, snapping to attention at the mechs approach. "That's Shepard." He fired off a quick salute. "Commander."

"JACOB" The mech bobbed its head in acknowledgment, and then turned its sensor pod towards Joker. "JOKER. I THINK YOU ARE AS SURPRISED TO SEE ME AS I AM TO SEE YOU"

Absently, Joker put a hand under his chin and pushed his mouth closed, trying not to stare at the hulking mech in front of him and failing miserably. Beside him, Jacob's bemused expression widened into an open grin. "I said you might have a bit of problem recognizing him didn't I?" He heard that, but Joker's mind was in too much of a shocked fugue to give him a more deserving reply than a raised middle finger. Eventually, he took off his cap and scrubbed a hand through his unkempt hair, looking uncertainly at the mech.

"Well... at least you can't eat my brains then. You can't eat can- uhm, forget I said anything."

* * *

Metal plate clanked under his feet as he walked down the passageway of the command deck, looking at the familiar bulkheads and consoles while trying to contain his sense of wonder. The ship wasn't exactly the same, bigger than her predecessor, her internal spaces sufficiently large enough to house a small fabrication plant in the armory and science lab, facilities that the original would never have been able to house. But the layout was similar enough that he could practically navigate the entire ship by memory alone, as if he had never left the original Normandy, or watched it's funeral pyre as the enemy's weapons sliced through her armor like paper.

Similar, yet starkly different. He stopped by the elevator access, noting another Cerberus logo stamped under the level indicator, just like those stamped on the uniforms of the crew. That had been a surprise, learning that such a secretive organization actually had an identifiable logo. His previous encounters with Cerberus personnel had always been thoroughly anonymous. Perhaps the Illusive Man saw this exception as a mark of personal pride, or as a reminder to the crew of where their loyalties lay, or maybe it was just an affectation of the shipyard staff. Whatever they intended, he saw it as a reminder of the kind of organization he was working with, and to be ready for the inevitable betrayal. Summoning the elevator, he wondered if Joker had felt the same as he had when they recruited him.

It hadn't been long since his reunion with the ex-Alliance pilot, and the ever quipping Joker had been more than ecstatic to show him the new Normandy that was to be his command, firmly ensconcing himself in the new leather seats once the impromptu tour was over. After Shepard assured him that his brains were quite safe in his head of course. Joker's sardonic sense of humor was as much a piece of familiar comfort from the ship that had been his home as the ship itself, even if he was wearing a Cerberus uniform. It was a strained sort humor, Joker hadn't been briefed on his condition before their first meeting, but if Joker could face him in the eye and still make a gallows humor joke about brain eating robot zombies, he could believe that Joker was taking the news remarkably well. There had been an awkward moment when he confessed to working for Cerberus for several months already, but Shepard wasn't willing to hold it against him when he had explained his reasons, or what the Alliance had done to him and the rest of the crew. Other than that, the helmsman had been more uncomfortable about the unprecedented addition to the crew than he had about his machine body.

"Mr Moreau, sabotaging the bridge cameras is not 'personalizing your workspace'."

"Just a little grease on their lenses, in case they get all squeaky and noisy... like ship cancer does."

The helm controls were located at the bow end of the command deck, and he was next to the elevator access on the starboard side, yet the voices carried easily enough across the distance, both from gesticulating human and pulsing holographic orb that was the ships cyberwarfare artificial intelligence. Privately bemused, he stepped into the elevator and let the door close on their little tit for tat. Joker had reacted venomously to the Enhanced Defense Intelligence, shortened to EDI, the moment he had found out about it, immediately setting about ways and means of reducing its presence in the helm short of active sabotage, something he had cautioned the pilot against. In truth, he shared Joker's concerns about an artificial intelligence on the ship, even one shackled to a very limited set of functions, seeing how all four examples of synthetic sapience he had come across in his service to the Alliance had unanimously tried to kill him in ways from mundane to ingenious.

But EDI hadn't tried to kill them yet, and from the initial discussions he had with the artificial intelligence, he had to admit that it's capabilities would be incredibly useful in any ship combat they found themselves in. He tried not to think dwell on the fact that all those incredibly useful capabilities would also be equally effective against him in his current condition. So long as EDI remained a benign AI, he could live with the fact that it's other function was to be a conduit for the Illusive Man's shipboard surveillance taps. What he would say and do to the Illusive Man if he had a choice in the matter however, was a lot less forgiving. Investment he may be, but the amount of trust the Illusive Man was asking from him was no small measure, and trust was a two way lane that didn't require constant surveillance.

The elevator doors hissed open, revealing an aged but familiar face who blinked once at the sight of him, and then crinkled a faint smiled as recognition lit up in her eyes.

"Commander Shepard, what did I tell you about relying too much on artificial performance enhancements?" Doctor Chakwas shook her head in mock exasperation, hands on her hips, sounding all too much like a doting aunt finding her favorite nephew in the middle of some minor indiscretion. Like stealing cookies... or stimulant abuse.

"OVER RELIANCE BECOMES DEPENDENCY YOU SAID" He lifted an arm to the sensor pod that was his head, his thoughts about the Illusive Man's surveillance put aside for genuine delight at seeing another familiar face. A simple mental command had the gun sheathes snapping open and close a few times. "IT APPEARS TO BE TRUE"

"Maybe next time you will listen to me when I give advice as your doctor then." She admonished with that faintly amused smile, moving away from the elevator and allowing him to step out. He had to hunch so as to avoid hitting the lower ceiling in the crew deck, something that she didn't fail to notice with a brief shake of her head. "I watched the Normandy crumble with you on board. It's good to see you still alive."

"AT COST"

"So it seems commander." That faint smile dampened a little, and she sighed. "A heavy price at that." She gave a small shake of her head, motioning for him to follow. "I think it best we continue this in the sick bay."

Medical, like every other room on the ship, was larger than it's analogue on the original Normandy. The shipyard outfitters had spared no expense in cramming the available spaces with top of the line scanners and robotic surgery stations. Filled as the room was, there was still enough space for the desk laden with all the accouterments that doctors seemed to gather. Chakwas took one of the open chairs, craning her head to look Shepard in the sensor pod. "I read the medical reports regarding your recovery and the circumstances surrounding it you know. I didn't know quite what to make of it when I first saw it. I thought it a joke in poor taste. Especially what happened at the end." A half smile, half grimace, made it's way onto her face. "It didn't take long for them to show me otherwise. How are you feeling commander?"

He paused on the brink of answering, considering her question for a while. Physically, he had little cause for complaint. There was no pain, no discomfort, and if his limbs still moved a little stiffly at times when he willed them to action, he could put that down to the limitations of the hardware in which it was built with. As far as he could tell, he felt perfectly fine, what was left of him to feel anyway. But at the same time, everything was... dulled was the only word that came to mind. He didn't feel blood pounding in his ears when he was being shot at, or pain when something punched through shields and armor to strike at him.

There were alarms and damage alerts instead, warning him when something had gone wrong. But they were on the fringes of his attention, easily overlooked unless he paid attention to them. Compared to the pain and fatigue he would feel as a human, they just weren't the same. Sensory loss he told himself, a natural consequence of shifting everything to machine senses. It wasn't as if he had forgotten what it was like to be human. Akuze, Elysium, his actions on Torfan, those memories defined him, pushed him to keep going no matter what, and they would stay with him his entire lifetime. He would deal with the loss of senses, maybe adapt to them somehow. But he didn't see any point in burdening the doctor with something that couldn't be helped at the moment.

"WELL ENOUGH TO WISH THERE WAS MORE OF THE ORIGINAL CREW"

She smiled and shook her head, taking his words at face value. "Our commander, ever the unshakable core. Most people would have been changed by the kind of trauma you endured, but not you I see. It's good to see you back on your feet, such as they are."

"WHY DID YOU LEAVE THE ALLIANCE CHAKWAS"

Now the smile vanished as her eyes took on a distant look. "After the Normandy was lost, things changed. Most of the surviving crew were reassigned and they grounded poor Joker. I was assigned to the Mars Naval Medical Center." She sighed. "A very respectable position, but it wasn't a starship. I told myself that it was simply time to come to terms with the losses we suffered, but the truth was that I was to be kept out of Alliance affairs the only way they knew how. I began to miss the creak of bulkheads and the subtle vertigo when the momentum dampers kicked in, but my requests to be reassigned were always rejected. And then a most curious man came along, asking if I would work for the organization he represented. I believe you might have met him."

"CERBERUS. JACOB"

"Quite so" She nodded, leaning back in her chair as she looked to the ceiling. "It was half a year ago when he came to my office, with the medical logs detailing your recovery. I didn't believe it at first, but the evidence the man had brought was very compelling. When he said you were being brought back to save the missing colonists, that was all the reason I needed to leave the Alliance." She turned her gaze from the ceiling and directed a stern one at him. "I don't work for Cerberus commander, I work for you. I trust that your dealings with them will be ethical."

Joker had expressed the same sentiment, though the pilot had been far more verbose and sarcastic about it. None of the other crew he had talked to had been as wary of the organization as he hoped they would be. That these two did, and would likely back him up if things did come to a head, was a comforting thought. He bobbed his sensor pod in reply, and then paused, considering one thing he had not thought of. Joker already knew the stakes and the risks, but committed all the same even before he had known about him. Chakwas was here because he was, and he wouldn't have her follow him without understanding the risks.

"THIS IS A HIGH RISK MISSION. CHANCES OF NOT RETURNING IS VERY LIKELY"

She crinkled a smile at his implied question. "We survived Saren and the Reapers, Commander, as well as the destruction of the Normandy. And now you're here to save those colonists from whatever it is that's taking them away. I've lived a full life, and I have no regrets. If we don't survive on this mission, I want to at least know that my life was spent trying to give the rest of the crew a chance that I've had." She sobered momentarily, leaning forward in her chair. "Tell me commander, if you don't mind my prying." She waved a hand at the sick bay window, gesturing at the mess hall and beyond. "What do you think of all this? Working with Cerberus."

He replied instantly.

"THERE IS A HIGH CHANCE OF REAPER INVOLVEMENT IN THE ATTACKS. THE COLONISTS MUST BE PROTECTED. I DO NOT FAVOR OUR ARRANGEMENT WITH CERBERUS BUT THEY ARE THE ONLY OPTION AT THIS TIME"

"Our immovable core, always ready to do what he believes in." She teased with an amused expression on her face. "They just don't make them like you anymore do they commander?"

He shifted his sensor pod left to right, focusing on the articulate, angular metal blocks that were his arms.

"I HOPE NOT"

* * *

It didn't take long after saying his goodbyes to Chakwas for Shepard to finish his tour of the ship, chatting briefly with some of the crew before finally coming to a stop in the cargo hold that would be his impromptu quarters for the foreseeable future. The captain's quarters that were to be his had he been sufficiently intact at the time of his awakening were... not suitable to house his current body. Lacking both space and the equipment needed to maintain and repair his body, the captains quarters would remain sealed until they had luxury of time to refit them. Given the nature of their mission, he found it unlikely that they would have the time or resources to do so until the current threat was dealt with. For now, he would make do with the mech maintenance scaffold the Cerberus technicians had hastily installed in one corner of the cargo bay.

Making do... he swung his optics across the expanse of the cargo bay, noting the drop shuttle hanging from the ceiling gantry and the fabricator modules installed in the central command post. The old Normandy would never half been able to fit more than half the things he saw in the cargo spaces, even disassembled. In retrospect, he was making do with far more hard resources at his disposal than he ever had when he had the full backing of the Alliance military. Politics and necessity had made him a Spectre, a direct agent of the Citadel Council, but it certainly hadn't meant an opening of credit chits to fund necessary equipment acquisitions. By comparison, the Illusive Man had practically showered money not just on bringing him back, but outfitting his mission with the best tools available, while giving him nearly total free reign with command decisions.

He couldn't help but make comparisons to the human ambassador, Udina, who had constantly stonewalled his best efforts to fight against Saren with endless red tape and complaints designed only to deflect criticism away from the politician and dump them straight onto him. If he had the Citadel Council and Udina's full backing, Saren's mad plan would have been on the wrong end of orbital bombardment on Virmire, instead of getting away to lead his assault on the Citadel itself. Little wonder why more than half the crew were former Alliance specialists. Talented but individualistic, they were disaffected by the stumbling blocks endemic to Alliance politicking and ended up leaving for an organization that cared more about results than it did about politics. And the results showed. He could see the appeal in the promises of the organization himself.

Except it was Cerberus that was funding all of this. The other crew didn't have the experiences he had with the organization, their bloody reputation considered to be exaggerations and ghost stories for the most, at least among those that had heard of their reputation. Mess sergeant Rupert Gardner, the two engineers Garbriella and Kenneth, they hadn't even heard anything at all about Cerberus but the name. To them, Cerberus was the only one who was fighting the Collectors, and by extension the Reapers, while the rest of the galaxy hid in the lockers and pretended that everything was fine. He knew better than to believe that they were just that.

The hiss of elevator doors opening prematurely ended his musings. He turned to find one of the Cerberus crew joining him on the cargo deck, her ginger hair instantly marking her apart from the crew that he had already met. That piqued his curiosity. Aside from outfitting the shuttles for orbital drops and the odd maintenance, no one had a permanent station on the cargo deck. Which meant she had left her station, whatever it was, to see him. She walked up to him, stopping at a short distance before saluting.

"I'm Yeoman Kelly Chambers. I've been assigned as your administrative assistant."

Administrative assistant? Now he found himself genuinely curious. It explained why she was here, but that was a posting he didn't expect to hear for anyone on a warship. In the corporate world, where that usually meant an administrator, just without that many responsibilities or authority, it was expected. On a warship, much less a Cerberus military vessel? Whatever paperwork he had to deal with could be handled by a VI.

"I'll manage your messages," She continued smoothly, "and help you monitor your crew."

Manage his messages? Go through his mail she meant. 22nd century communications technology didn't mean real time communications all the time across intergalactic space, so having an internal mailing system in the Cerberus network for mission updates made sense. Unless whatever junk filters he had attached to his account was so thoroughly outdated that they'd let through any kind of trash, spam mail not being a unique earthling invention in the millennium or so of galactic civilization, she was another pair of Cerberus eyes, except they were a charming green, and in official capacity. Not that it was necessary. He had trouble believing that anything of note that ended up in his account wouldn't also find it's way to the Illusive Man's eyes the moment they arrived. But monitor his crew? What did that mean exactly?

"And I must say, it's such an honor to be working under you Commander Shepard." Chambers added with a smile, sounding every bit as earnest as he was suspicious.

"GOOD TO HAVE YOU ABOARD" He replied perfunctorily, wondering how to deal with this particular situation. Professional respect, he could deal with. The crew knew who they represented, what they were doing, and who he was supposed to be. Probing where their loyalties lay, and how best to bind them to him, was something he could do at his own pace. But earnest admiration like Chambers here was always difficult to deal with, determining the plant from the honest ones wasn't easy. He decided to play for more mundane information instead. "YOU MENTIONED MONITORING THE CREW"

"I monitor their mental states Commander." She answered demurely, shifting her weight subtly to one side, looking quite at ease. "As a trained psychologist, my job is to keep a lookout for any particular signs of mental stress and help them adjust to it. If there are any serious issues that the crew has, I bring them to your attention."

The Alliance had crew filling similar roles on their larger ships, so her explanation made enough sense that her role didn't seem out of place. Not really. But he hadn't ever heard of it called monitoring the crew. "SHIP COUNSELOR"

"That's one way of looking at it, but not officially" She corrected. "People are more wary about expressing themselves when they know that someone is analyzing them. I can do my job better if they don't really know that I'm watching them."

Sensible and clever. Of course by telling him this, that either meant she wasn't as clever as she implied, or she was trying to get his trust. If she was one of the honest ones, he could use that as his link to the rest of the crew. He decided to test it out anyway.

"YOU HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED TO THE NORMANDY. HOW DOES IT FEEL"

"How does it feel?" She sounded surprised at the question. "I was hand picked by the Illusive Man to fight the greatest known threat to the entire human race. How do I feel? Honored, exhilarated, terrified." She said the last word with a faint quaver to her voice, but then it perked up again as she continued. "But mostly, I feel encouraged knowing that you're with us on this fight. Under your leadership, we can't fail."

Oh. One of these ones.

"WE WILL DEFEAT THE COLLECTORS"

Her eyes lit up at the statement. "I trust you implicitly commander. The moment I met you, I knew I could close my eyes, fall back, and you'd be there."

He bobbed his sensor pod in reply to her claim, but kept from saying anything else. He'd be there? To laugh at her naivety, or to catch her? Definitely one of those types. She either had a good act, or... he really didn't want to entertain the thought. Odd now that he thought of it, he didn't remember seeing her put off even slightly by his countenance so far. Not once. She hadn't flinched or looked away when he brought his sensor pod to bear on her. Most of the crew had been a little too intimidated to look him in the... eye, so to speak. Under other circumstances, he might have found it charming. As it was, he found it to be a little disturbing that she was acting as if he was still flesh and blood rather than cerebral matter and war machine. And then it hit him. She was trying to put him at ease, treating him as a normal, if accomplished, human being! He revised his initial impression of the woman. Smarter than she looked and sounded. That didn't mean he trusted her, yet. But she could be a valuable ally if things came to a head.

"PERHAPS WE WILL TALK LATER. THERE ARE MATTERS I MUST ATTEND TO"

The spark in her eyes dimmed a little, but she nodded and flashed him a quick smile. "Of course Commander. Maybe we'll talk later."

He watched her go, remaining there until the elevator doors hissed shut before turning his back on it and heading to one of the alcoves in the cargo bay. Hand picked by the Illusive Man, a trained psychologist, and being unusually friendly for someone she had just met? He would not have put it past the Illusive Man to try and send someone who's job was to persuade him to work fully with Cerberus, whitewashing their past with earnest smile, sparkling green eyes and assurances that they weren't 'all that bad'. It wasn't a bad ploy, but it could be turned around to his advantage against Cerberus if it became necessary. And it wasn't as if the charms were entirely lost on him, lack of necessary parts or not. The mech vocalizer hissed with a flat sound that would have been it's closest analogue of an amused snort.

He stepped into the maintenance alcove, the scaffold unfolding to its full height with the pneumatic hiss of hydraulics as automated sensors scanned his body specifications. Articulated robotic arms unpacked from the scaffold, triple digit manipulators latching onto and removing armor plate from his torso and arms with mechanical precision. Constant bursts of data chatter from his diagnostic VI and the scaffold guided the process, fueling docks clamping onto open ports, hissing with He3 fuel while a separate pair of mechanical arms probed his back, extracting spent life support canisters of nutrient rich solution and installing fresh ones. He remained still throughout the process, recognizing the irony of it all.

The former Spectre expected Cerberus to dispose of him sooner or later if he couldn't be fully turned to their will, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. The Illusive Man would not need to turn EDI or the crew on him if he decided that he was becoming too great a threat to be allowed to live. He could simply lock out the scaffold remotely with a sleeper program, one buried so deeply in the core systems that he would never find until it went live, and wait him out.

He had spent a great deal of time examining his body ever since returning from Freedom's Progress, not just to find his limits, but to determine what made his new body tick, what could be improved on and more importantly, how dependent he was on Cerberus support. The answer was _a whole damned lot_. Even if he discounted the precision control equipment embedded in the machine body and the daily calibrations it required to keep from malfunctioning, the sophisticated array of life support systems and spinal nerve taps embedded in this body needed regular maintenance just to keep him alive and maintain control of the machine. Cut off from resupply and repair, it would not last very long before the components started to break down, leaving him paralyzed and comatose before death claimed him. And it wasn't as if he could get it elsewhere. The highly oxygenated artificial cerebral fluids circulating in his system alone didn't have a counterpart anywhere in known Alliance space. He _needed_ Cerberus.

That didn't mean he would just just give up, lay down and die, or bend to the Illusive Man's will. Saren had given up, and nearly doomed the galaxy in the process. He wouldn't make that mistake. He had met that challenge alone and unsupported on the crumbling defensive lines of Elysium during the Skyllian blitz, had faced it again while his squad died in the Thresher Maw infested ruins of Akuze. Those experiences had shaped his focus, hardened him to the horrors the galaxy could throw at him. And he had taken those experiences to merciless and bloody victory on the battle scorched world of pirate held Torfan, leaving nothing alive in his wake. He didn't know if he would be forced to act before the Collectors were dealt with, or if he would even survive the fight against them, but he would plan accordingly.

For now, he would work with Cerberus. Whatever the Illusive Man's real goals were, the Collector attacks were an undeniable fact and the commitment of the Cerberus crew to see the attacks come to a preferably violent end at least, were genuine. But even if they hadn't, he had an obligation to put a stop to the attacks. Dying didn't erase the principles and duties of an Alliance marine that easily, no matter what anyone thought. He had told Chakwas that the colonists had to be protected, and he'd meant it. But to do that, he needed an army. Or a really good field team.

Information permeated his consciousness as he accessed the mech's internal memory storage, calling forth the missives Illusive Man had sent him while the scaffold continued it's constant hum of activity. Ruthless the man may be, but Shepard had to admit a faint admiration for the man's skill at planning. His revival, the new Normandy, designated SR-2, and the dossiers of highly talented individuals scattered throughout the galaxy with skills the Cerberus head believed would be of use to him. Mercenary veterans, former Salarian wetwork operatives, a Krogan warlord and an incarcerated biotic savant were among the list of names he had been provided with. Recruiting them, the hows and the when, that was his problem. And that was a problem in itself. These were very talented individuals, their accomplishments ranging from impressive to downright horrifying, and not always in a good way. The savant had brought down an entire space station, smashed it into a moon, on a whim? That spoke volumes about potential, but also mental instability.

Not that he had much of a choice. These were the people he had on hand to gather for the upcoming fight against the Collectors. Tali had her own mission to attend to, and the most of the others from his previous crew had vanished into thin air. What little the Illusive Man was willing to divulge on those that hadn't vanished was that they all had their own concerns and were unavailable. He didn't believe that was the whole truth, but without knowing their whereabouts, searching the entire galaxy for them would be an exercise in futility. He could imagine what the Council's response would be to the idea of Collector attacks, seeing how they had denied sending any aid when the Geth had shown up on Eden Prime. The Collectors were a 'human' problem that should be dealt with by the humans and no one else, unless he could find hard evidence of a link to the Reapers.

That left the Alliance. But he had done his work on them, searching on public extranet sources for the Alliance response to the attacks. He avoided looking in secured Alliance databases with his old security clearances. Even if they still worked, unlikely, he was still on a Cerberus ship, using Cerberus communication networks to access them. He didn't see any point to giving them any more than what they already had. But the publicly available information was exactly as the Illusive Man had claimed. The number of attacks downplayed, convenient communications service failures on the attacked planets they didn't list, empty platitudes, but no announced results, plans of actions or progress towards identifying, much less stopping, the threat. All in very tiny articles contemptuously hidden in the back of extranet news sources. He could tell when the Alliance was stonewalling.

Which meant he was on his own, with whoever else he could persuade to join the fight. And that meant going back to the dossiers, and picking out who would be the first he'd try to recruit. The krogan warlord, the mercenary veteran, the Salarian operative or the super powered biotic psychopath serving multiple life sentences for over eight hundred counts of murder? If he could have, he would have sighed. He tapped into the ships communications circuit, dialing the helm speakers with a thought.

_"JOKER"_

The communications line crackled for a bit with the unusual sound of static before Joker replied. _"Sorry about that Commander. Thought you were EDI trying to sneak around the mute button or something."_

He forbore asking on what that 'something' was. _"SET COURSE FOR THE SAHRABARIK SYSTEM."_

_"WE ARE GOING TO OMEGA"_

_

* * *

_

_Author's note: _

_Joker's one of my favorites to write. You can just close your eyes and picture his sarcastic, ever quipping nature that isn't quite a joke, but funny all the same. Seth Green really does bring his character to life. And yes, Kelly does seem a bit sappy here, but she's been sappy throughout the game, and certainly doesn't seem put off by interspecies relationships. Extreme cybernetics? Probably not as off putting either. Or she's just that good a psychologist._

_As to biotic Mecha-Shepard, since he never was one to begin with, and biotic training takes years, I think we can shelve that idea for now, as interesting as the idea could be. Still, the possibility of non-standard upgrades are always there._

_And come on. Just 6 reviews? Is the story that bad or something?  
_


	4. Chapter 04: Orientation

**Chapter 04: Orientation**

"Wish we had a combat dropship instead of a shuttle, seems like whoever runs the place is planning a welcoming committee for us that isn't so welcoming." Jacob mused above the rumble of the shuttle engines, one hand adjusting the sights on his shotgun before swapping to feed a fresh set of thermal clips into it's heat exchange array. Finishing with his preparations, he pulled up his omni-tool and logged into the Normandy's communications network, calling up a video feed from the micro satellite surveillance array the ship had deployed minutes earlier. The video resolution started off as blurry, but quickly resolved as he focused the array at the dock Omega's traffic control had directed them to, revealing a scarred hanger littered with the hulks of stripped out ships and small scrabbling figures that could have been people picking at the wrecks. The operative frowned, zooming in the array on one particular cluster of figures before whistling under his breath as the picture resolved into a squad of heavily armed and armoured soldiers waiting at the landing pad. "Quite the unwelcome they've got waiting for us."

Overhead, the speakers crackled as Patel added her two credits from the shuttle pilots seat. "Don't worry sir, doesn't look like they've got anything that can punch through our kinetic barriers. We can make a drop and extraction without much trouble if they start anything."

Seated next to Jacob in the passenger compartment, Miranda had her own video display, focused on the wrecks and the figures grubbing about them than the soldiers Jacob was looking at. "Omega," she started with a disgusted look, "what a piss hole. I've come here on business before, and each time I have a strong urge to take a shower after it's over, even after the decontamination cycle. This time doesn't look like it will be any different." She tapped at one of the figures on the surveillance feed with a manicured finger. "Vorcha down there among the wrecks and by the number, there's a strong possibility that they have a nesting ground inside. I'd say they aren't part of our official reception, but the scavengers won't hold back from joining in if it looks like they can get something for the trouble."

_"NOTED"_

The questioning look she directed at him might have had a better impact had he actually a face to direct it at, rather than the shuttle's internal camera. He would have welcomed it, or anything at all, even enemy action, to distract from the current reality. Only the limited, flat monotone of the mech's vocalizer and it's way of parsing his sentences into terse words kept his emotional state from leaking through. Despite his body being folded to it's most compact form for transportation, Shepard was still far too large to fit inside the compact shuttle's confines. The only way the Kodiak drop shuttle could carry him was outside of it's sealed hull, and he had to make the ride was strapped onto it's back between the rear thrusters like an oversized packing crate. He was armoured, sealed against all forms of hazards that hard vacuum could provide, and didn't need to fear ambient temperatures or radiation from the shuttle's maneuvering thrusters, so he had agreed.

But he'd died in space, choking on the same vacuum that his body was exposed to right now. Sensor pod folded against his chest, without the nervous system he had taken for granted a lifetime earlier, he couldn't see the emptiness of space around him, or feel his blood vessels bursting in the vacuum, but it didn't matter. His mind knew he was in space, exposed to the same nothingness that had killed him once before. He wanted to scream incoherently. The memory of dying that way had been etched it's in his consciousness with ruthless brutality, and he was facing the same conditions again. When the atmosphere sealing kinetic barriers of the dock buzzed past the shuttle seconds later, the sense of relief that washed over him was almost palpable.

_"THE PLAN IS UNCHANGED. MIRANDA WILL BE THE COMMAND CONTACT ON OMEGA UNTIL THE DECEPTION IS UNNECESSARY"_

_"Of course commander," _the communications system for his body did not carry expressive tones very well, and her voice came out almost as flat as his, but he had no problem imagining the slightly pleased tone to hers. Or maybe not, the woman had a firm control of her expressions most times. _"You do realize however, that you may have to follow my instructions in order to maintain our cover?"_

_"THAT IS EXPECTED"_

Having formulated the plan himself, Shepard didn't bother acknowledging that sort of question with more than a curt answer. The charade would only last until they had learned everything they needed for their next course of action, or until the shooting started, in which case there would be no point in hiding who he was. Miranda's statement of the obvious was a transparent test of just how far he would be willing to commit himself to this plan, especially after the disagreements over command decisions he had with her, undermining what authority she had as his second in command back on Freedom's Progress. He had no more reason to trust the Illusive Man's personal agent anymore than he could eat a ration bar or drink whiskey with this body, but since he couldn't leave her perfectly shaped behind on some remote world, they had to find a common ground to work with. Like it had been with very dead Wilson and his erstwhile Eclipse allies, letting her take the lead role in probing their welcome for an ambush or traps would work to their advantage, especially if they assumed he was merely just another unthinking mech.

Allowing her temporary command here, no matter how brief, also gave him an opportunity to see just how she thought and operated, how much she could be trusted, where any fallout wouldn't be too noticeable if he had been wrong. He thought it worth the risk. If this was going to work, he needed the trust of his crew, and Miranda was no exception when he had given her this role as a test. The irony of granting Miranda command authority over him, no matter the reasons or how brief, especially given how he had been unwilling to budge on who commanded the operation with the Illusive Man, wasn't lost on him. If the Cerberus leader had a sense of humor, he'd be laughing himself sick enough once he had read Miranda's report of how things had gone.

_"Landing in ten seconds commander, commencing final approach. Heads up, our reception looks a bit restless."_

The only reply was the hiss of landing jets firing as the shuttle descended to the landing pad on pillars of blue flame, on board telemetry transmitting to Shepard the widening circle of armed soldiers as they stepped back from the blast zone. But instead of landing, the shuttle remained hovering low off the ground, the ping of disengaging safety bolts loud enough to be heard above the hiss of the shuttle jets. Shepard hung in the air for a pregnant moment, still suspended by the same mass nullifying effect field that held the shuttle aloft against Omega's gravitational field. And then the field contracted, the larger gravitational field asserting it's grip on him and pulling him down to the deck with an ear splitting crash. The reverberations of the crash were only just beginning to echo when Shepard's arms unfolded from his body, automated systems disengaging safeties as ammo blocks slid down loading ramps, stretching his legs to their full height. Vision flooded his consciousness as his sensor pod rose smoothly away from the chest, sensors flickering to life in time to catch Miranda and Jacob leaping down from the shuttle, weapons held in the same way their reception had, ready, but not yet aimed.

The outer ring of soldiers remained standing with weapons ready, fingers twitching above their triggers, but none of them opened fire. One of them, a Batarian, closed his omni-tool before taking a half step forward and motioned with his grenade launcher. "That's far enough humans. Tell your shuttle pilot to land and quit your tough merc act, unless you want a real fight on your hand. We're here to stop trouble, not start it."

"Charming for a change," Miranda demurred, keeping her auto pistol in one hand while she placed the other on her hip. The shuttle remained airborne. "I imagine you had something to do with the sudden lack of open ports?"

"Don't get cocky Cerberus." The batarian rasped, motioning for his men to draw back several steps. "You're here because word is that you've got a damned big Alliance hero with you, and he's supposed to be dead."

Jacob's brow twitched at the accusation, almost too minor to notice, and Shepard himself felt a mild surprise at the batarian's insinuations, even if he was looking at the wrong person to be asking the question. So much for the deception plan, if someone on the place like Omega could gather enough intel to identify their ship, who it really belonged to, not to mention his own unexpected return to the living as well before they had even arrived. That they weren't shooting was some small relief, as that meant they weren't open enemies, yet, but the implications had him concerned. Did the Illusive Man deliberately leak the information he wondered, or was the organization's analysis of Omega's intelligence capabilities inadequate? Miranda didn't let on, nor did she react anymore to the question than to arch an eyebrow at the batarian. "You seem quite certain for a lot of wild guesswork."

The batarian's for eyes slitted in a facsimile of a sneer. "You're not as subtle as you think. We had your ship tagged the moment you entered the Terminus systems, and we know he came with it. Aria wants to know what brings a dead Spectre to Omega, and what Aria wants, Omega wants." Nothing changed in Miranda's demeanor when the batarian dropped the unfamiliar name, simply shifting her weight to the other foot, but to Shepard's precision optics, it seemed as if she was... angry somehow. But it seemed the batarian wasn't finished yet, turning from Miranda to look directly at the YMIR mech. "Can't blame her for wanting to be cautious. Things have a habit of blowing up around you, Shepard."

So much for the deception plan. Those few sentences spoke plenty about Omega's groundside situation, enough for Shepard to get a pretty good idea of what exactly was going on and why. If Omega was a place without laws or organized government as the Cerberus and extranet files had claimed, this Aria must be one of the more influential bosses that invariably sprung up in any anarchy, especially if she had spies out on the borders of the Terminus system. Taking the measure of any potential threats to their rule was as natural to them as prioritizing hostile gunmen was to him. Of course there was the matter of his identity being known even out here, despite being drastically different before his... reconstruction, meaning someone in Cerberus had definitely talked. Little wonder if Miranda was angry, given what had happened the last time a Cerberus operative had talked. He focused his sensor pod on the Batarian.

"YOU ARE NOT SURPRISED"

The batarian crossed his arms, looking Shepard in the eye. "This is Omega. A dead human walking is one thing. Compared to that, a human in a tin can isn't that surprising." He thumbed a digit down the dock at the open airlocks leading into Omega's interior. "Aria wants to see you. Now."

* * *

Matriarch, boss, empress, bitch-in-chief, it was a heady list of meaningless titles and curses that regularly got attached to her name. She didn't care what new names they came up with to go with hers, because they all came with that same undercurrent of fear and respect she had spent a century cultivating, and all meant the same thing. Omega was hers, no further explanations necessary. No conditions, no exceptions or hedged words to her undisputed rule. The absoluteness of it still made her smile even centuries after she had established her domain. The mercenary gangs, a few outliers from various intelligence branches, they sometimes entertained the thought that her hold on Omega was not as complete as she believed. Powerful yes, but _absolute rule? _Unprecedented, impossible even for someone like her. There had to be cracks in her rule, where her hold was either an illusion or just weak enough that they could act without fear of her discovery, or snuffing them out with a command if she so wished. History insisted on it, producing a litany of rulers who had cracks in their power wide enough to raise the spectre of incomplete rule. History was wrong, because Aria didn't just rule Omega, she _was_ Omega.

Patriarch once thought he had ruled Omega before Aria had arrived. Her krogan predecessor had employed a close knit web of guards and informants, feeding him with information on 'who to smile on and who to crush', as he fondly put it whenever he was in the mood to reminiscence. It was an impressive achievement, for a krogan, when most of his species didn't even acknowledge the value of informants unless they were used as target practice. Aria's own arrangement was far more complex. Asari matriarchs were renowned for making the most of their long lifespans, drawing from centuries of experience to see into society, steering them to where they belonged with a carefully placed word when others would use an orbital strike, and Aria was a virtuoso among matriarchs. The centuries she spent observing Omega's vicious pulse of anarchic violence and wealth, crafting networks that fed her information from thousands of individuals, painting a complete living picture of Omega that only she would ever witness as the station's heart, mind and soul. The Patriarch's information web looked comically pathetic by comparison. Her reach on Omega was absolute, and nothing happened on the station escaped her notice. And she knew what to do with all of it, every scrap of information, every hope, ambition and dream, every whispered word. Lies, truth, action and patience, who lived and who died or vanished, knowing which finely honed blade to use in the running of her empire came to her as naturally and immediate to her as breathing was.

She'd known about the salarian before he even showed up in the Afterlife club months ago, his transport tagged as an object of interest the moment it entered the Terminus systems. A former elite of the STG, well preserved for someone ten years past the age when most Salarians died out, Mordin had arrived at her doorstep explaining his intent to open up a clinic in the Gozu district with a small army of mechs at his side. She'd liked him almost immediately, the salarian outlining his intents and morality at two hundred words a minute without a single blink of the bulbous eyes of his kind. She had no use for morality herself, seeing how the rest of the sentient galaxy used it as an excuse to agonize over things that either felt good or benefited them, but Mordin's had been so unapologetic of its nature, so simple in it's terms yet so utterly ruthless, that she had found it completely refreshing for a change. He had made it clear that he would open that clinic, whether she agreed to the idea or not, and was only asking out of politeness despite being surrounded by her enforcers. It was a novel bravery rare amongst most newcomers in Omega, and she quite liked the salarian's demeanor.

Aria had allowed the clinic, to keep things interesting. A fresh cycle of promising individuals in Omega could always be counted on to start a little trouble, create new bounties and trouble spots that kept the station moving. The Blue Suns had been far too comfortable in their holdings on the Gozu district, and the good doctor could be relied on to make them sweat a little. He hadn't failed to disappoint her yet. In the months that followed his arrival, there had been the expected increase in violence which quickly tapered off once the doctor began staking his premises with the corpses of the previous shakedown squads they had sent to his place. She had been amused to no end with the paradox of the deadly salarian, medicine in one clawed hand and a gun in the other, certain that before too long, the good doctor would start forming his own mythos among the station's more superstitious denizens. Her own intelligence networks had made mention of embryonic movements to enshrine the broken horned salarian, something that both brought a smile to her lips and left the doctor absolutely aghast even while he continued to solidify his reputation among the Gozu residents. In a place of constant violence and brutality like Omega, the hope Mordin brought to the unarmed segments of the Gozu district was as addictive as any drug, very much like Omega's other special visitor, Archangel.

It had been an amusing conceit when the human population had started calling Omega's latest vigilante by that name, the idea of a mythological figure from human superstition out to exact justice and provide protection to the weak all but laughable, but it was a name that spread quickly among the rest of the station as his reputation grew. Archangel was no Mordin Solus, and Aria hadn't been interested enough to have her informants run a deeper look at the would be protector. So long as the merc hunting vigilante didn't turn his sights to Aria's interests, she didn't particularly care which way the outcome of his one person crusade went. If he wiped out the three major merc gangs on Omega single handed, that was fine, the power vacuum would soon be filled by others who were already under her observation. If he was ground into fine paste like every other vigilante in Omega's past, then at least he would be an entertaining diversion from the usual open warfare that characterized fights in the station. Omega had only one rule. Hers. If it was followed she didn't care if everyone solved their problems with pitched battles on the streets, a common enough occurrence. That was what made this Archangel character interesting. The vigilante played it close and clever, never openly striking at his targets when ambushes, deception and assassination were his preferred tools of the trade. The mercenary groups were entertainingly off balance trying to respond with numbers and firepower at something that always just slipped away at the last moment, their members whittled away by an elusive ghost. He reminded Aria of herself from centuries ago when she was still a commando.

Omega thrived on trouble, and these two individuals were right in the center of it. Mordin's little clinic in Gozu was making it's mark when a plague had struck, fast and widespread enough to cripple not just the district, but the Blue Suns who controlled it. It hadn't taken long for the vorcha to start moving in on the territory like the scavengers they were. Aria had the area quarantined, posted guards, and left orders to shoot anyone leaving, locking Mordin and his clinic in the middle of all those Suns and vorcha and a whole lot of violence. The quarantine hadn't been out of any concern over the plague, such things ran their course, cure or no cure. She just wanted to see what the doctor would do next.

Archangel on the other hand, was facing a very predictable end after having done enough damage to the mercenaries groups to finally get them thinking a little. She had let the ceasefire they arranged for their hunt go unhindered - it was already starting to fracture. They had finally cornered the vigilante in his hideout, but cornering and killing were two very different things as the mercenaries were starting to learn. He wasn't quite an Asari commando, a properly trained huntress in her maiden years would have simply vanished, but she did have to give this Archangel credit for stamina. The vigilante had amassed a considerable number of dead bodies in the last three days of his one man siege, not that most of the station believed it would make a difference with the mercenaries hiring freelancers to make up the shortfall.

Aria knew differently.

Ships came and went from the Terminus systems all the time, but when she had learned that a ship bearing a very distinct profile had entered the Terminus systems, one that she was quite certain was as dead as the human who had been it's captain, not bearing the Alliance markings as it originally did, but ones belonging to Cerberus, it was unexpected. Now that was a surprise to Aria's domain, and she disliked surprises. Omega, disliked surprises. By the time the ship was burning it's way to the station, she was no longer surprised, impressed, but not surprised. For a tiresome group of human extremists, the organization had taken their considerable resources and had finally used it with the same raw, flexible ingenuity endemic to their human stock, showing that they too could come up with interesting results at times.

A shame they hadn't kept the body.

Aria had seen more Spectres in her time as a commando for hire than the rest of the Omega populace, sometimes as temporary allies, most times on the opposite ends of their guns. Salarian, turian, asari, even a krogan once, she found them entertaining enough to always keep an eye out for them whenever one showed up in the Terminus systems. A Spectre always meant more than a little upheaval and chaos wherever they went, the occasional exploding space station, and the human one they had recruited was no exception to the rule, making more than a few people sweat when he showed up. Showing up as a dead Spectre on Omega, this time on a mech's feet rather than his own or cryogenic stasis pod, had piqued her curiosity. She had arranged a meeting to find out just what brought the dead here as a natural precaution. Omega had demanded it.

It had been an interesting meeting, a first even for her. Dead people as a rule didn't talk, or come back encased in a machine normally derided for it's stupidity. Knowing that, she had picked a place well away from the Afterlife club to see just what sort of reason could bring back the dead. Abrupt but polite, he avoided the questions, asking his own about the very two centers of trouble she had been watching on Omega, his intent charmingly direct. He didn't ask for permission, and didn't need it, but had outlined his intentions quite briefly in a half dozen flat electronic words. She had given him a few crumbs of information, just enough to see him on his way, and then left. She had no real interest in the outcome, Omega would go on regardless of what happened, but she wanted to see what followed next.

It was good to be queen.

* * *

"We-e-e-ll, what do we have here?" The batarian leered from behind his console, displaying a mouth full of fangs in an appreciative grin as he chuckled appreciatively. All four of his eyes waggled suggestively as they traced the outline of the newcomer's generous figure and skintight bodysuit with undisguised lechery. "You're in the wrong place sweet cheeks. Strippers quarters are-"

The crack of Miranda's pistol was lost in the roaring tempo of the Afterlife clubs music, but the muzzle flash and sparks from where the slug embedded itself in the wall next to the batarian's head was more than enough to cut him off mid sentence. Holstering her weapon in the same swift motion, the Cerberus tactician looked the mercenary recruiter in the eye, her professional grimace never changing one millimeter. "Now that we've established what I'm not," she began smoothly, pretending not to notice as Jacob sidled up behind her, scowl on his face and the electric tingle of his biotics ready for trouble, "perhaps you would be interested to know what we _are _here to offer."

"We understand that you're hiring a great deal of freelancers for a raid on this Archangel's base of operations." She held up a hand to forestall the recruiter from interrupting her with whatever rules and pay they had for freelancers. "We represent Synthetic Insights, and given your situation, have an offer that you may find quicker and more practical than throwing bodies at it until Archangel has been dealt with." She flicked an OSD across the intervening space, the recruiter catching the the storage disk easily with a practiced hand. At her gesture, he loaded it into his omni-tool, a holographic representation of an assault platform springing to life on the display. The mercenary simply sneered dismissively, much as she had suspected he would.

"We've already got the mechs lady. Another one won't make a difference."

"Standard mechs." She interjected curtly with a wave of her hand, delivering her spiel in a matter-of-fact voice. "Simplistic virtual intelligences, lacking any understanding of tactics or strategies, they are about as sophisticated as a pile of rocks and easily outwitted by anyone with a functional brain, which I am assured that this Archangel has, given how badly he has your superiors running in fright." Her expression remained impassively professional, but inwardly, she smiled at the sudden scowl that made it's way on the recruiter's face. "We at Synthetic Insights however, have been testing an improved model of the standard YMIR class assault platform, with far superior combat performance specifications as you can see in the data disc we have provided."

The batarian was about to say something at that point when the holographic display switched to a video feed from their visit to Freedoms Progress. Denial, protest or an order to get out, whatever it was, it died before he could do more than open his mouth as a YMIR mech charged across the battlefield, knocking another YMIR's weapon out of the way before bisecting it with a combination of point blank fire and sheer brute force. Miranda had to admit, Shepard's actions that day would have made quite a head turning impression on anyone familiar with just how limited the factory built machines really were. A shame they had to be wasted on the dredges of sapience like this recruiter. The video feed continued with the first mech breaking the knee of another with a sharp kick to the joint, culminating in a stomp that crushed the head of the fallen machine, eliciting a whistle of appreciation from the batarian.

"That looks impressive, I'll give you that much, but you're wasting your time. We're not buying mechs, just hiring freelancers for the job."

"And we're not selling, _yet_" Miranda smoothly continued, emphasizing the word 'yet'. "We have sufficient performance data against synthetic opponents and ex-military members, but our design parameters call for something a little more. Our goal is to create a superior fighting platform and for that, we require field data not just against mechs and soldiers but on highly dangerous and experienced individuals, individuals who have demonstrated a significant proficiency not just in combat but initiative, tactical thinking, planning and situational awareness. Given the duration of his operation on Omega and the amount of damage caused to three major mercenary organizations in his tenure, this Archangel appears to be just the sort of individual who would make for an ideal test subject. We have formed an equitable business arrangement with the Blue Suns over the past few years and as we have a common goal, we would be willing to lend them one of our experimental units already on station for this particular field test. You only need to provide a target, and set it loose against him. In exchange for whatever data we may gather from its field test, we would be happy to provide the Suns with the first pick from this new line of mechs once the design enters production."

"Already on the station huh?" The batarian crossed his hands, an unimpressed look on his face. "And what's to stop us from just taking it off your hands for free if it's so damned good?"

"Then we remotely disable it's combat inhibitors and you can personally find out just how good it is along with the rest of the Suns." She finished cheerily, letting a mirthless smile creep up on her face for the first time. "I imagine your superiors would not be too pleased about that turn of events, assuming they live that long. Of course, we have also included the standard anti-tamper protections inside of the mech as well as an advanced cyberwarfare counter-intrusion module should you attempt to dismantle or reprogram it. Any intrusion in its programming or primary systems will deactivate the combat inhibitors and arm the failsafe self-destruct system. A standard precaution against theft of prototypes you understand."

The mercenary uncrossed his arms, snorting in disgust. "Alright corporate, you win this round, but I can't make the call, I have to check in with my boss. Don't go anywhere."

"What are the odds he'll come back with a few more thugs to try and squeeze some more concessions out of us?" Jacob asked when the doors had closed behind on the departing batarian, playing the role of corporate aide. He shrugged to show what he thought of the idea, neither were strangers to Omega or it's way of running, and they were quite capable of taking care of themselves, but it was clear he didn't relish the idea of fighting their way out of the place, no matter how many Suns came. Miranda only smiled at the thought. Not at the prospects of a fight of course, since it would mean their plan had failed before it could even begin and she refused to let that happen, but at the suggestion that the mercenaries would risk another major headache at their doorsteps while this Archangel was still loose.

"That's not as likely as you think Jacob. None of the groups involved are exactly open to the idea of letting any outsiders get involved in their operations. If the mercenaries are hiring freelancers, it means they're hinging everything on preserving enough of their numbers for when the real assault begins. They don't want another serious firefight breaking out on another flank and threatening everything they're trying to achieve, it would mean losing just about the only resource that Omega doesn't supply, dignity." She raised a knowing eyebrow at the Cerberus operative. "You've known me long enough to know that I'm an excellent judge of character Jacob. I think we have quite a good chance of having our offer taken up and getting that field data by the end of today."

Not less than five minutes later, she was proven right when the Blue Suns recruiter returned, alone and no better armed than he was when they had first seen him. "Jaroth and Tarak saw the video." The recruiter began without preamble, naming the respective bosses for Eclipse and Suns mercenary groups on the station. "They're willing to give your fancy toy a try if it's ready to go now, but they have conditions."

"Of course they do." Jacob muttered to no one in particular, but the batarian ignored him, holding up his fingers as he ticked off the points with them.

"First, we get salvage rights if the mech is scrapped in combat, doesn't matter how impressive your self destruct is, there's bound to be something left. You get the data, we get what isn't vaporized, and everyone walks away with something if your mech isn't as good as you make it sound. Second, you can use whatever transport you've got to bring him to the operations area, but you follow our pilots, deviate and we shoot you down, no questions asked. You land where we tell you to land, and no detours or funny ideas about 'taking a look over there'. Third, as long as your mech's going to be in our operations area, the both of you are coming as well to stay there as our insurance. If it goes berserk, we fill you full of holes, and maybe we ask you questions if there's anything left to ask. If you don't like them, then we don't need you, do we have a deal?"

Jacob frowned as the conditions rolled down, but Miranda simply listened impassively, familiar with the rules that marked the typical dealings with the mercenary groups. They were merely a formality of course, rather infrequently followed if an opportunity presented itself to take advantage of either party showed up unless there was a better deal to be had by keeping to it. The conditions they were outlining would give the mercenaries a fair advantage if things did indeed turn out badly, stranding them in the middle of hostile territory. She made her decision.

Ten minutes later, they were walking down to the one of Omega's ubiquitous transit hubs, a list of directions and Blue Suns IFF code in hand. It didn't take them very long for them to find what they were looking for, even had Patel's biometric transponder been shut down. The Kodiak shuttle was an uncommon enough transport in the Terminus systems that it a few of the denizens of Omega would stop by to gawk at the ship's smooth lines, though never stopping for more than a few seconds. The active mech assault platform that was standing next to it on the other hand, had generated a significant amount of living traffic away from the ship, even if it wasn't shooting at them. Most common citizens of Omega had a keen nose for trouble well before it started, the station's anarchic violence weeding out the stupid or the slow with remarkable efficiency before they could learn to walk, and a live mech with the firepower of a squad out in the open was trouble just begging to happen. Especially when a pair of krogan Blood Pack mercenaries were ambling towards an autonomous weapons platform which clearly did not sport their colors.

"Nice ship," one of the krogan rumbled to his partner as they stopped a few steps away from the shuttle, deliberately ignoring the mech and human pilot that had turned to face them, "would look nicer in red."

"Yeah, how about we see about changing that?" The other chuckled, casually hefting the heavy grenade launcher in his hands like a toy, the business end pointed towards the mech in a very coincidental fashion. "We could paint it with the pilot, humans have the right color in their bodies."

"I think you might find a few problems with that idea." Miranda interjected succinctly from behind them, pressing her pistol against the unarmoured fabric of the krogan's rear knee joint and firing in one smooth motion. The slug tore through the cloth, ripping apart ligaments and driving the krogan to one knee as he bellowed in pain. The other reacted instantly, whirling with shotgun in hand when a space warping biotic field wrapped itself around the mercenary, pulling krogan and weapon apart in a bluish halo of null gravity. Even in the disorienting field of zero gravity, the krogan retained presence of mind to snap out his sidearm, while the other brought his weapon around one handed to bear on Miranda. And that was as far as it went. A pair of articulated autocannon sheathes clamped over both krogan heads with the loud creak of compacting armour plate and pulled their struggling bodies over to the mech's side-

"HELLO"

-and pitched them roaring over the landing platforms safety railing.

"GOODBYE"

The krogan mercenaries flailing bodies dwindled into the darkness of Omega's towering landscape, their final death cries vanishing beneath the high pitched whine of constant aircar traffic as they vanished.

"Good god, that's just crazy" Patel muttered, drawing back from the railing where she had tracked the krogan's descent, assault rifle still cradled in his hands. Shaking her head she turned back to Miranda and snapped to attention. "Nothing to report ma'am, other than the krogan just now. Couple of gawkers, and maybe one or two who were thinking of boosting the shuttle, but the co- mech here had them turning tail without trouble. Uh, so how did they take the offer?"

"It went down quite nicely like I said it would, so prepare for takeoff Patel, we're not wasting anymore time than we have to."Miranda disliked involving the other crew more than was necessary on field missions, especially Omega where their lack of experience and limited training would make them a liability. But Shepard's body made the idea of using any of the VI controlled aircars with their low carrying capacity to get around Omega out of the question, necessitating Patel's presence as shuttle pilot for all their transportation needs while they remained groundside. The mech just whirred it's sensor pod her way, waiting expectantly. The Cerberus tactician simply put a hand on her hip and gave it an I-told-you-so look.

"We have our deal with the Suns, and a date with Archangel."

* * *

He was exhausted, three days of constant fighting taking it's toll on his already tired body. The lightweight full combat armour he had spent twelve years training, fighting and living in was starting to feel like a poorly made lead suit, the helmet claustrophobic and stifling despite the constant hum of air regulators that kept him cool and breathing. He'd started taking combat stimulants less than six hours ago, and hadn't stopped taking them since then. Even when his aim twitched like a sarkha reptile in heat, his vision clouded by the chemical cocktail in his bloodstream despite the best compensatory efforts of optical enhancement sights, he didn't hesitate to pop the cap off the next vial and slap it into his suit's dermal injector ports at the first sign of slowing down. There were no worries about running out anytime soon, medi-gel, heat sinks, ammunition or black market performance stimulants, what was an adequate supply for a team of thirteen was an overwhelming stock for just one person. At the rate that he was going through them, it would be another three days before they were exhausted, and he would be dead long before he started to reach that point.

The precision rifle bucked in his hands, and an asari head vanished as the hypervelocity slug punched through kinetic barrier, armour and bone in a spray of blood and gore. A different head took it's place, cradled assault rifle in it's arms chattering away. Concrete and steel chipped away around him, tracer fire outlining his body in a hail of incandescent fire. The rifle roared one more time, and the fire stopped, headless body slumping to the ground. He ducked away from his perch, moving by muscle memory alone as a fresh crackle of fire cratered the wall behind where he had stood moments ago. It was getting harder and harder to remember to relocate after firing, and each time his rifle drooped a little more. But he couldn't stop, not yet, not while he had things to do, a job to finish, and a betrayer to get even with. The golden winged symbol he wore on his right arm was a remembrance of his lost team, a call to right wrongs, and the name he had finally embraced fully. He kept on moving, popping up from another window and making another mark to the name of Archangel amongst a field of corpses.

"Come on Jaroth you slimy bastard, show yourself for one second, just one second," he whispered, mandibles clicking uncontrollably from stimulant abuse, hoping to catch sight of the elusive salarian mercenary commander through his scope, "you've only got so many witless fools willing to run down that choke." The bridge was already littered with corpses, most of them headless, the bodies piled high enough that the mercenaries had resorted to launching inferno grenades to burn away the dead before the next assault. Even from his distant perch, the air was so thick with the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh that his atmospheric scrubbers couldn't keep it out. A few months ago, the constant assault on his nose would have him emptying the lunch he hadn't had in the last two days. With it's prevalence of flamers among the fighting populace, Omega had stamped out that particular sensitivity hard in his time here. Blood pooled and ran in little rivulets all over the bridge where the inferno grenades hadn't scorched yet, red, blue and yellow mixing to create a rainbow of morbidly cheery colors. And still the assault waves, every last one convinced that this would be their chance to take down the infamous Archangel, came rushing headlong into the killing zone. As many as he took down though, more came to replace them, aircars and drop shuttles carrying fresh loads of troops and mechs to their staging area, just tantalizingly out of range of his guns. His former superiors in C-Sec would be impressed at the number of enemies he had made in amongst the criminals such a short time.

He'd come to Omega a stranger, out to set things right the way they should be, away from the endless rules and restrictions that had plagued more civilized systems, the Citadel's C-Sec worst of all. He'd taken all his skills and training and put them to work at trying to fix the wrongs that the galaxy preferred to ignore. He kept being a stranger, a dozen aliases and assumed personalities that made hiding in the sea of mercenaries, bounty hunters and criminals a simple task as long as he kept his wits about him. The people of Omega had given him a name though, even if it wasn't his real one, an identifying label for one of the most destructively effective individuals ever to arrive on the station. He hadn't kidded himself on his chances when he had begun his work. Omega had seen his type before, crusaders, vigilantes do-gooders out to be a force of justice in a place that laughed at it, an endless game of opposing forces that Omega never lost, the eventual failures enshrined in fables as 'that stupid fool who got himself wasted on a crusade'. It didn't matter how good they were at their trade. Sooner or later, they would make too many enemies, slip up just once, and they'd be crushed under the weight of Omega.

He wasn't any different, knew how it would end the moment he stepped off that transport, rifle in arm and a burning desire to do what he had always been prevented from doing. He'd hadn't quibbled the end he'd meet, but he had done everything he could to make it last. Skills honed in the Turian Hierarchy, C-Sec and beyond had kept him alive all these months alone with nothing but his wits keeping him one step ahead of everything Omega could throw at him. Then the others had come, in ones and twos, totaling at twelve individuals from various backgrounds, people who had taken enough from the system, tired of the criminals who always got away and wanting to make a difference now that he'd shown them that he could make that difference. Twelve more names, and no room for mistakes. He had believed he could take the responsibility, that he could shape this patchwork band of specialists into a crack team of commandos worthy of the tutelage he had received under the late Shepard. Only one name remained now, a traitor to everyone else on that list, a name he would cross off himself, in the unlikely event that he survived long enough.

Flashes of light caught his attention, instincts forcing him to dive low as a series of grenades screamed over his head to impact on the distant wall behind him. The explosion tossed shattered furniture every which way like toys, heat and shrapnel washing harmlessly over his armoured back, but leaving his head ringing like a bell. The rifle popped up over cover, sights feeding data straight into his targeting optics. Another alien head filled his sights, and he paused, letting the rifle dip a little before pulling the trigger. The armour piercing slug tore straight through the grenade launcher's volatile magazine, and the target vanished along with his friends in a violent cloud of shrapnel and fire. He rolled on the ground, fetching up against a support column and popping the white hot heat sink where it smoldered on the debris covered floor.

"Just hold on a little more." He slammed a fresh sink into his rifle. "Just a little more you bastards, and we can all go down together."

"I promise."

* * *

The landing area was a swarm of activity, eezo powered aircars ferrying a constant stream of freelancers armed with a motley assortment of weapons and protective gear, though some went without the latter, dressed in brightly colored utility jackets and pants that would no more stop a punch than a mass accelerator slug. The mercenaries in comparison wore full combat armour, their fewer numbers dotting the crowd as guides, herding the confused hire-ons into their respective deployment zones with gestures and the occasional shove. Despite the chaotic mass of moving bodies and shouted orders, a few heads turned to stare at the two humans with a Blue Suns escort, the man dressed in a nondescript lightly armoured combat uniform getting a cursory glance, while the other wore a skintight bodysuit that hugged her curves while still leaving everything to the imagination gaining more than a few lingering stares. Most heads however, stopped and stared at the heavy assault platform that noisily stomped after the newcomers, scattering freelancer and mercenary alike out of the way of it's multi-ton bulk and earning a few choice curses.

Miranda took it all in at a single glance, analyzing from the organization and uniformed troops the level of commitment the three most powerful mercenary groups on Omega were putting into this effort, deducing their overall strategy and the capabilities of their target from the resources at play. Her professional face of polite disinterest never changed, but she had to grudgingly admit that this Archangel certainly seemed worth the effort of recruiting based on performance alone, if he could unite these three together with the single goal of wiping him out, committing what appeared to be greater than eighty percent of their active forces to the task. There might have been a greater concentration of allied troops and guns with a singular goal somewhere else in the re-purposed asteroid base at some point of history, but the statistical probability of that was exceedingly slim. She still had her reservations about recruiting an unknown factor whom they had only found out about from the unencrypted Omega broadcasts EDI monitored, but she could see the potential value in this Archangel's skill set, providing that he could be controlled. From the corner of her eye, she saw Jacob shaking his head in disbelief, making the same kind of deductions she had.

"All this for just one guy?" He muttered aloud, casting skeptical another look at the gathered troops. "I make at least twenty professional mercenaries just in this staging area alone, twice that in freelancers, and a whole lot of heavy weapons they're bringing in. Archangel must be really good to have them this spooked."

Their Blue Suns escort barked a nasty laugh at the Cerberus operative through his helmet. "And he's going to be really dead once we're through with him. You're new on the station aren't you? Archangel's been a thorn in every merc's side ever since he showed up. He does everything he can to screw with us, shipments go missing, operations compromised, outposts torched, every month it gets worse, he even came close to putting a hit on Tarak and the other merc bosses. Normally we'd never be in the same room unless we were fighting over it, but we're all working together because he's hit hard just about every merc group still operating on the station, and none of us are going to get any sleep until that nightmare is vorcha food." He paused to draw a finger deliberately across his throat. "We took care of his friends nice and slow, but we don't care how Archangel gets his, as long as he's dead when we're done."

The sudden rattle of small arms fire drowned out the escort's voice, echoing loudly in the enclosed area before suddenly ending with the whip-like crack of a high powered rifle. The rapid fire thump of a grenade launcher answered in reply, the muffled roar of their explosive payload rumbling through the landing area.

"Sounds like you're making a start of it already." Jacob lifted an eyebrow at the uncaring shrug the mercenary gave by way of reply.

"Hah! That's just a distraction to keep him busy while we get the rest of our men into position." The high powered rifle cracked again, punctuating his words with the sharp bang of volatiles detonating close enough to send tremors through the floor. "There's only one way in, and he's a good shooter, but we've been keeping him pinned down in that spot for the last three days, and now he's getting tired. He's gotten away from us long enough, and nobody wants to screw it up. This time we're going to hit him with everything and put him in the ground for good."

Jacob's troubled expression told Miranda everything she needed to know about what he thought of their chances of their own plan succeeding, but he said nothing. He turned his attention back to the preparations the groups were going through, occasionally shaking his head at the state of the state of the equipment the freelancers had brought along with them as well as the young age of most of them, some barely out of puberty. Miranda had known the man long enough to say with certainty what was going on in his head, in all likelihood a mixture of regret and pity for the bloody idiots grinning from ear to ear, all the while destined for the meat grinder this Archangel had set up without a single clue of what waited for hem. Having been on Omega long enough to be acquainted with the way things had, and would always, worked on the times she had come here as an agent, she didn't particularly share that sentiment. If the freelancers couldn't see what they were heading for, then Archangel was doing their parent species a favor by removing them from the gene pool early.

"This way," their mercenary escort jabbed a finger down an alcove where an open door revealed several mechs in their packed configuration. An Eclipse technician was inside, distinguished by the emblazoned black sun on his his yellow armour, attention mostly focused on the diagnostics console linked up to the hunched form of an inactive assault mech. Their escort snapped his fingers, catching the attention of the technician who blinked at the newcomers. "Fargus? Who the- oh, you're the ones with that fancy new combat mech Sutka radioed in about huh?" He shut down the console, ignoring Miranda and Jacob to peer at the mech with a critical eye.

Their escort nodded. "Yeah, they're the ones. Jaroth and Tarak have given the go ahead, so they get to stick their mech with ours and see if it's as good as they say it is. You can't touch it though, they've got anti-tamper dead man switches built into the thing, and the bosses don't want anything funny to happen because you couldn't keep your fingers to yourself. Other than that, they're your business now."

"What an ass." The technician muttered as the Blue Suns mercenary left, turning back towards the mech standing behind Miranda. "Looks like an older Hahne-Kedar YMIR chassis, probably last years line of modular assault platforms." The human cocked his head to one side, watching the machine track his motion with a faint whine of servos. "Optics aren't factory standard though, and those power assists sound like they're Ariake Tech's new line of superconductive motor control systems, or I'm a vorcha. armour plate looks a little thin to be ERCS design, I'm betting Kassa Fabrication. Armament isn't bad with those Armax Mark 08 autocannons, but that Haliat armoury rocket launcher is just so much crap, fragmentation warheads don't have the punch you need these days, it's last century tech compared to disruptor missiles" He crossed his arms, directing a skeptical eye at Miranda. "This is supposed to be a new cutting edge mech? It's got decent specs for a mech today, but I could build a better one out of the scrap we get around these parts, and with bigger guns."

"And as intelligent as it's components no doubt." Miranda's thinly veiled insult made the mercenary's mouth twitch irritatedly, but she continued without giving him a chance to interrupt. "If this Sutka didn't tell you, we at Synthetic Insights believe that autonomous weapon platforms are only as good as their programming is, not their hardware. We find that superior hardware with inferior intelligence is a waste of resources when an optimized intelligence can provide a far more cost effective solution, something that the less well informed and easily impressed have a difficult time understanding."

"Oh I understand it alright corporate, just like I understand how often your kind tries to palm off your cutting edge prototypes that have a habit of exploding on us mercs. I saw your sales video, impressive for just a mech, almost too damned impressive if it weren't raw video you had on hand. The bosses may think it worth the shot, but I'm not so easily convinced." He shrugged before Miranda could object. "Doesn't matter what I think though. They want your mech in if you can keep your end of the deal up, so you're in." The technician waved a hand to the back of the impromptu maintenance bay with a snort. "So park your mech over there, and I'll give you the OSD with the IFF and targeting data. Since I'm not supposed to 'touch' your mech, you can load in the data yourself but just so we're clear, you do that right here where I can watch you, and when you're done we're locking this place up in case you feel like making any surprise last minute adjustments before it's go time. We clear on that corporate?"

"Quite." Miranda's frosty tone was joined with a disdainful look, activating her omni-tool and gesturing at the spot the technician had indicated. The mech immediately obeyed, just barely squeezing into the empty alcove before turning around to face her. Taking the data disk from the technician, she made a brief show of sliding it into the port of her wrist computer and tapping the appropriate transfer protocols. When she was done, the device beeped and the mech's optics flickered with the processed data. She tapped one more button and the light winked out, the machine folding in on itself as it went to standby mode while the mercenary impatiently tapped his foot.

"You done?" He didn't wait for her to reply before ushering them out. "Good, now get out of here. Sutka wants me to help fix the gunship so no one's going to be in this room until it's go time, especially you."

The doors closed shut and lights winked out, the only illumination in the room coming from the glowing red status display of the code locked door. Two minutes later when the outside noise had faded away, another light cast it's illumination in the room as Shepard's body unfolded, quickly rising to it's full height. It only took a moment to run his sensor pod across the entire room, built in illumination lamps casting their light on numerous inactive LOKI security mechs sitting there waiting for the activation signal, as well as the YMIR assault mech, still connected to the diagnostics terminal. Sabotaging the mercenary's plans were simple enough, and he booted up the cyberwarfare systems embedded in his body, but let it shut down a moment later as a better idea occurred to him. Communication circuits hummed to life instead as he opened a private encrypted line with the Normandy, connecting to the only member of it's crew with the skills he needed.

_"EDI"_

The ship's AI response was instantaneous, crisp and clear. _"Yes Shepard?"_

_"EXTENT OF YOUR CYBERWARFARE CAPACITY"_

_"Complete Shepard. Aside from signal masking and electronic countermeasure management, I can seize control of a ship's master control system through their internal wireless network at close range, disabling weapons, venting atmosphere or overloading the reactor core as necessary."_

The answer had all things he already knew about EDI's capabilities, or had guessed at, but it had to extend to more than that. He paused before continuing, considering the consequences of what he was about to do. This would be unlike anything he imagined the programmers ever imagined the AI would be assigned to do, much less the ground team, given the circumstances of his rebirth. It was almost a certainty that it would circumvent the hardware blocks EDI had been constructed with, and if the AI went rogue here, the damage would be impossible to contain. But no, the hardware which housed EDI was still secure on the ship where the security staff could get to it, and she knew that. Going rogue was a zero sum game, and that made the choice for him. A little bit of trust now might go a long way for when he would need it later. More importantly, they would need all the firepower they could get. He began uploading the video feed from his sensory optics, sweeping them across the room to show EDI the platoon sized mech force stored in the room, as well as the only other assault platform that wasn't him.

_"POSSIBILITY OF REMOTELY CONTROLLING MECHS HERE"_

_"I calculate that my systems are capable of simultaneously overriding the local firewalls and managing the targeting and IFF algorithms of up to twelve thousand standard mechs providing they are operating with an active wireless communications channel. Unfortunately, existing blueprints suggests that standard mech control design architecture prevents direct control over any mech through remote systems, limiting tactical flexibility. Master control assigns the targets to shoot, and the on board VI determines how to shoot. In addition, I will require access to a high gain communications array in order to manage the necessary data output in a timely manner. The communications system embedded in your body is sufficient for this purpose but will be tasked to capacity if all mechs present are to be overwritten. You will not be able to communicate in real time with the the ship or the ground team for the duration of the control."_

No real time communications with the ground team? That was unacceptable, but a conundrum easy enough to get around.

_"COMMENCE OVERRIDE. LOCK DOWN MINIMUM UNITS REQUIRED FOR BANDWIDTH. COMMAND CHANNELS CANNOT BE COMPROMISED. UPDATE GROUND TEAM"_

_"Of course Shepard, beginning override sequence. Alert, I will not be able to mask the increased signal traffic while the override is in effect. There is a high probability of an investigation team arriving at your location."_

_"UNDERSTOOD. MAKE BEST EFFORTS TO SECURE SHUTTLE AND GROUND TEAM. ADVISE THAT THEY ARE TO AVOID CONTACT WITH ARCHANGEL. ELIMINATE ALL MERCENARY ELEMENTS"_

The diagnostics console blazed to life, streams of data kaleidoscoping across the display screens faster than his optics could follow. All around him, mechs began their stiff, mechanical awakening from dormancy, sensor illumination lamps glowing a sterile white before flicking to the angry red of their combat mode. Beside him, the YMIR assault mech unpacked itself, rising to its full height with an abrupt bark of its combat readiness state. Forty heavy pistols were drawn from built in holsters by mechanical hands at the same time as the color coded display of the door flicked from red to green, hissing open on magnetic rails to reveal the Eclipse technician, omni-tool in hand. He didn't even have a chance to look surprised before a round from Shepard's autocannon punched through armour, flesh and bone with contemptuous ease, leaving a gaping hole in his chest for him to comically stare at. Shepard stepped outside, batting the swaying corpse out of the way with a weapon arm as forty pairs of cybernetic feet tromped behind him.

_"BEGIN THE REVOLUTION"_

_

* * *

_

_Editors note: And so ends Chapter 04, with the coming overlords and all day pi computing for organics. Maybe not as much action as I had originally planned, but the ending for this one was just too epic to spoil by adding more to it. I promise much bloodshed, carnage and all round zombie robot kickassery in the next chapter, as well as Archangel's own debut. Your favorite Turian won't be overshadowed in the arts of delivering action by mecha-Shep, I promise you that. Needs more Joker though.  
_


	5. Chapter 05: An Education

**Chapter 05: An Education**

"Man, I am so pumped just waiting for this to go down." John Whitson grinned excitedly as he checked and rechecked the M-6 Carnifex hand cannon for the twelfth time. Nobody particularly paid attention to him, and he didn't care about them either. The other freelancers were either nervous or just plain serious when it came to the job they had hired on to do, but not him, oh no. He didn't recognise any of them, so they must have been come in from Omega, getting all scared now that they were thinking of facing this Archangel. But he'd grown up on Omega, he knew how to take care of himself, and that was with the kind of firepower this sweet hand cannon of his had and then some, best fifty credits he ever spent. Now he couldn't wait to try it out on Archangel, blowing him away with the awesome power of this gun and permanently making his name in Omega. The Blue Suns would definitely want him on then, maybe make him a commander, and with it, all the credits and babes he'd ever want for being the man to put down their biggest headache in years.

Stacking packing crates for crapola pay and no respect was not how John Whitson was going to spend the rest of his life, not him, no way. He had plans for the future, living on the edge, no rules, no boundaries to slow him down, that's how he was going to live his life. This was going to be his big break and there was no way he wasn't going to be able to make it work. Ain't nothing was going to cross him then, and then he'd come back and show those jerks who used to step on him who was boss. He was going to be big, bigger than Omega, and all the mercs in the Terminus systems when he was done, even more famous than that jumped up Council hero, Shepard. "And if he gets in my way, I'm going to take care of him too," he pointed the gun at an empty patch of wall, putting his finger to the trigger, "just like that," and mimed pulling it.

There was a roar as the hand cannon fired, and a grin spread widely across his face in appreciation. It quickly became a puzzled frown when he realized he hadn't actually pulled the trigger, and there was no recoil. That wasn't how the holo-vids said it was supposed to work, wasn't it? Where was the big muzzle flash? That dealer had better not have gypped him.

The first inkling that John had that something was wrong didn't come from the gun, but from somewhere near the staging area where there was another thunderous crack, and the ground actually shook under him. He looked around, wondering if anyone else had heard it too when he saw a dark gray painted YMIR mech with red stripe on it's shoulder striding from the mech bay, leading a whole bunch of LOKI mechs with it. He scowled at that, turning to another freelancer who was slowly backing away from the mechs. "What's the deal with that huh? Letting the mechs go first? I thought we were supposed to be at the head. How am I supposed to get my shot at Archangel then?"

Whatever answer he might have made vanished under a hail of fire that chewed the freelancer to bloody rags, a blinking, dotted line of tracers sweeping across the ground to neatly bisect an Eclipse soldier struggling to pull up his grenade launcher. The soldier didn't even crumple, he simply exploded in a shower of gibbets and armour fragments. And then that's when the screaming started.

His mind was still locked trying to process what he was seeing, but John's body had grown up on Omega and needed no thought to recognise danger, his legs driving him off his seat and down low behind an aircar with alacrity. A heartbeat later the snarl of LOKI held hand cannons began to fill the air, high velocity slugs whizzing past his head or making the aircar's thin metal shell ring with each impact. Some of the freelancers and mercenaries had the same idea as him, ducking behind the vehicles to hide from the mechs. A few even tried to return fire, popping up from their impromptu shelter to hose the area with rifle and pistol shots. But their attempts didn't do anything more than make the big grey mech mad, turning it's autocannon on them and reducing several of the mercs into shredded meat. Vaguely, he was aware that someone else had started screaming close to him, but he didn't pay attention to it, huddled against the car and trying to think of anything but dying.

A dozen meters down from where he was, a rocket sizzled into one of the aircars, exploding into a ball of fire, engulfing the mercenaries hiding behind and turning them into screaming torches. From behind, another detonation rocked the landing area hard enough to knock John flat on his face. Something struck him hard in the back, and he cringed. When the thundering roar of fire continued and he still wasn't bleeding out on the floor, he risked a look to find a dismembered arm on the floor, assault rifle still clutched in its twitching hand. Suddenly his hand cannon seemed far too small for what he was facing. Trying not to cringe, he picked the rifle from the limb and cradled it close, trying to absorb a shot of courage from the weapon. It was heavier than the pistol, but the weight was very comforting, and his frazzled mind started to put together a coherent thought.

"No-no-no-no-no not like this, not like this. Come on, come on you piece of junk," he rapidly mouthed, running his fingers over the rifle as he looked for the safety. He found the catch mechanism, fumbling over the lever just as a LOKI mech rounded the aircar. He screamed, falling on his backside and scrabbling away with his feet. The mech raised it's gun, but before it could fire the weapon, it's torso exploded in a shower of sparks, and the machine fell to the ground. A human figure vaulted over the aircar, landing beside John and giving him a hard look. Still panicked, he lashed out with a clumsy fist, only to have it knocked aside and receive a slap that set his ears to ringing by the same hand. The man grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him close enough to see in detail the milky white of his one glass eye and deeply scarred face, yelling over the roar of autocannons.

"Oi! Pull yourself together you bloody pissant, or I'll finish that mech's job for it!" The barrel of a shotgun in his hand gestured at the sparking, headless body. "We're already getting slaughtered badly enough out here without idiots like you helping them by acting like a goddamn fruit."

"I'm not a- not a fruit," John sniffled, trying and failing to put on a brave front in front of the scarred freelancer. A stream of incandescent fire burst overhead to smash into another aircar, metalwork crumpling for an instant before the entire vehicle vanished in a blue tinged explosion of dark energy, sucking a nearby mercenary into the maelstrom of wildly fluctuating gravitic fields that simultaneously compacted and tore his shrieking body into bloody gibbets. At the sight of the carnage, something very warm and unpleasantly wet began filling the front of his pants and his breakfast wanted to come out the wrong way. "I... I can do this." the choked, quaking words sounded unconvincing even to him.

"Yeah?" The freelancer scowled, grabbing the rifle out of his hands. A flick of his fingers released the safety lock, and he slammed it back into John's hands. "Then prove it you sod, or we're all going to die a bloody useless death out here anyway." Explosions rocked the landing area, mercenaries and freelancers blasted out of their hiding spot by another rocket. LOKI mechs chased the survivors who were scuttling away, requesting surrender in emotionless voices even as they mechanically fired their heavy pistols into mercenary backs. The freelancer unhooked a fist sized object from his armoured vest, pressed a button and tossed it over the aircar. A moment later, the air crackled with an electrical discharge, deadening the stuttering roar of mech autocannons. In that moment, he popped up, firing a shotgun blast that was answered with an squeal of dying electronics before diving down again. The autocannons started up instantly, streams of fire crisscrossing the battleground, filling the space where his head had been before sweeping away to other targets.

"Pulse grenade," he snapped by way of explanation, "messes up their targeting and buys a few seconds, but I don't have a whole lot of the bloody things, and it doesn't work much on that big grey mech. Don't know why or how and I don't care, but the damn thing is a goddamn sight smarter than most mechs I've fought and it's leading the rest of the machines, maybe even controlling them directly, my eye on it. We take it down, and maybe we have a chance of making it out of here in one piece. I've got a blasting charge that'll do the trick, but I can't get close to it without getting an arse full of goddamn slugs."

John audibly swallowed, seeing what the freelancer was getting at and dreading what the man was going to say. Against everything his brain screamed for, his head nodded in traitorous agreement. "I can d-d-draw their fire."

The freelancer nodded grimly, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Good lad. The mercs won't be pulling our arses out of this one, and everybody else I can reach is already hamburger meat. Anyone taking one of the aircars out of here is just begging to get shot down, so I need that distraction, and you're the only one left who can provide it. Now listen good, that's an M-76 Revenant you got there, lot of ammo and puts a hell of a lot of rounds out in a hurry, so don't worry about aiming, just point in the mech's direction and pull the trigger. Get their attention and for the love of saint sanity, keep your goddamn arse in gear unless you want to eat a fistful of bullets, got it?"

Keep moving, point and shoot, two simple things to keep himself alive. He told himself he could do it, yeah, he could do it. He tried tightening his grip on the rifle, feeling it's heavy weight in his arms like a life preserver. "I..got it."

"Right, here's how it's going to work." He unhooked another fist sized ball from his vest, holding it in his free hand and gesturing with it. "On the count of three, I lob this here grenade, that's your cue to start shooting while I leg it to that bleeding boss machine. If the mechs start tossing hell your way, hit the dirt and stay low until I can hit them with another pulse, then find some other cover that doesn't explode and can take a beating. That grey one's smart enough to send something special your way if you stay in one spot for too long. Clear?"

"I understand." There was something in the man's tone that put a leash on John's panic. He was still scared out of his wits, but listening to the freelancer's plan and believing that it really was their best chance of getting out alive helped quieten the shaking in his boots. "What's your name?"

"This is a hell of a time to ask for name kid, but if it'll keep you at your job like I told you to what the hell." He edged to one end of the aircar, hefting the weight of the grenade in his hand. "Don't bother giving me your name kid, not unless you can earn that right, but mine's Zaeed. Zaeed Massani. Now let's do this." He threw the grenade and sprinted out from cover in the same motion. Brilliant light outlined his figure as the grenade exploded in a storm of arcing electricity, mech fire stopping instantaneously.

"I-can-do-this-I-can-do-this, I can do this!" Rising to his feet with a yell, John brought the rifle to bear on the machines- and froze. Most of the aircars were smouldering wrecks on the ground or scattered in pieces when they had exploded, surrounded by corpses and body parts. Bone white mechs dotted the area, destroyed by explosions or slugs, but far too many more stood uncertainly, sensors flickering sporadically as electricity arced over their bodies. By comparison, only one small clutch of survivors remained, hiding behind the burnt out wreck of a car and firing their weapons with abandon. And then the mechs overcame the effects of the grenade and started firing again. Survivors screamed and yelled as armour piercing pistol slugs punched through protective chest plates and flesh, falling under their makeshift barricade as they clutched wounds. John added his frenzied yell to theirs, sighted the weapon and pulled the trigger.

Like a jackhammer, the Revenant rammed into his shoulder, twinkling muzzle flashes instantly dazzling his vision as it bucked and jerked in his grip. A LOKI mech caught a burst of his fire in the chest, armour plate tearing apart as it fell under before recoil forced the rifle up and away, shooting harmlessly into the sky. Two more mechs turned to him, pistol barrels frighteningly huge as he looked into him. Screaming like the damned, he struggled to bring the rifle back down, clipping one with a shot that tore off an arm at the joint. The other hand continued to hold it's weapon, and both mechs fired, their guns booming like the end of the universe. Sparks and fragments bounced off the aircar, tugging at his vest as John dived to the ground and crawled into the hollow of it's base. "Hit the dirt, hit the dirt," he moaned breathlessly, risking a peak at the rapidly dwindling survivors, "Come on Zaeed, where are you, throw the grenade, I need to hide, do-it-do-it-do-it."

Heavy mechanical stomping announced the presence of the heavy mechs before he could see them. Like angry gods, twin YMIR mechs stomped through the smoke of the battlefield, autocannons mercilessly blazing away at the survivors, ripping apart battered aircar wreck, armour and flesh like wastepaper. Freelancers and mercenaries screamed hoarsely at their gaping wounds, but more died without a sound as their bodies were instantly ripped into pieces by the storm of metal. The white one paused in its fire, switching to it's other arm to let fly with a rocket that drowned out their cries, blasting already torn bodies into bits and throwing intact ones off the landing platform where they howled with rapidly fading voices. The grey one paused in its advance, sensor head sweeping the area when it alighted on John. The autocannon began swivelling his way, but he had already bolted, firing blindly with the rifle as he sprinted towards a support pillar. "Arse in gear, arse in gear," he chanted Zaeed's instructions rapidly, feet thudding on the ground as he blindly fired the rifle behind him. In the distance, the autocannon began it's deadly stuttering roar. "Don't stop, don't stop, do-aaah!"

Something hit him in the side, picked him up off his feet and slammed him onto the ground like a freight vehicle, his body bouncing twice before it came to a rolling halt, the rifle lost and forgotten in his nerveless grip. Something warm and wet began dribbling down his face, chest and left arm, his vision swam like he'd been on drugs, but even in that hazy world, he could make out the red glare of mech optics staring at him, the gray painted machine stomping ever closer. He barely remembered to run away, but when he tried to stand up, or drag himself away, he found that his body wouldn't listen. Initially faint but rapidly growing in intensity, pain and fear began to flood his consciousness and a whimper managed to get past his mangled lips.

And then Zaeed was there, bursting out from under the landing pad railings with grenade in one hand and a heavy demolitions charge in the other. LOKI and YMIR mech turned to face him, but he threw the grenade high and it exploded, showering the area with arcing bolts of electricity that sent the machines into uncontrolled fits. Lightning arced around the grey YMIR's body too, but it continued to move unhindered, smoothly bringing the autocannon to bear on the freelancer's charge. Zaeed ground his boots into the floor, halting as he arced back and threw the blasting charge, the explosive sailing across the intervening distance with deadly accuracy. Even in his hazy lucidity, John could barely contain his shock when the mech dug a foot under the rear half of a torn aircar, flipping it onto it's side just in time to catch the demolitions charge, contact adhesives firmly attaching it to the vehicle's roof. And then it kicked the vehicle in Zaeed's direction, rocket hissing from it's launcher to strike the wreck.

The explosion tore away at the machine, and something ignited under the aircar's tortured underside, a horizontal pillar of fire roared into existence, flames washing over the mech and accelerating the burning vehicle into Zaeed, bodily ramming the freelancer into the safety railings. Man and fiery transport pitched over the edge, the light of the flames rapidly fading before the demolition charge ignited, rocking the ground where John lay bleeding and despairing. The grey painted mech turned it's optics back to him, stomping on the bloody, cratered deck plates, smoke lazily wafting over it's fire blackened armour plate, autocannon levelling with his head. John tried to get away, feebly kicking with feet that didn't want to catch on the ground. He met it's unblinking optics, cracked lips parting to croak pleas between choking gasps. "S-s-stay away, I want to," a fit of coughing racked his lungs with stabbing pain, "want to... live."

Surprisingly, the mech lowered the autocannon, stepping back with a crunch of groaning deck plate as a pair of humans walked up to it, their figures no more than indistinct blobs in his hazy vision. One of them walked up to the mech, voice mushy in John's ringing ears. "Shuttle took a few hits, but she's intact and secure, Patel's dusting off now so she can stay out of harm's way. Looks like your little revolution broke the back of Eclipse in this fight though, the survivors are dropping armour and practically climbing down the support struts to get away. Think I recognised Jaroth's corpse a while back there too with some interesting intel on him, I've got it here in case it might be worth looking at later. You took quite a gamble back there you know, putting all these mechs under EDI's control. Didn't think you'd do something like that given what happened the last two times we had mechs running loose without control."

"That does seem rather unlikely of you commander, especially considering mech contribution to your current state," one of the other humans spoke, voice lighter and more feminine, "EDI's behavioral blocks are built into it's hardware, limiting it from directly attacking us or seizing control the ship, but there's always the chance of an unforeseen loophole when you started giving it access to a great deal of mechs. Even if EDI hadn't turned on us, it was still a significant risk you took with this plan commander, starting an open battle like this could easily have compromised our operation. Though I must admit that it has been a remarkably smooth one so far."

"NECESSARY RISK TO WEAKEN OPPOSITION. ARCHANGEL NOT YET CONTACTED" The mech boomed, turning to one of the humans. "STATUS OF BLUE SUNS. BLOOD PACK"

"The Blood Pack pretty much packed up and went under the moment the firefight broke out commander, looks like they had an access tunnel in their section of the deployment zone, it's blasted shut now." The man shrugged, his tone puzzled. "That's pretty odd though, I've never known the krogan would shy away from a fight. As for the Suns, a few of them tried to hold us back from their side of barricades, but most of them left on the gunship before we could break through. EDIs tracking their transport, looks like they're flying around in the local airspace, but they're not going after the shuttle and don't seem to be coming back down for an attack run either. There's still a few stragglers from the Pack and Suns hiding around the barricades, nothing that will slow us down much if we go through them, but most of the surviving mercenaries are gone."

"ARCHANGEL IS STILL THEIR PRIMARY TARGET. TIME IS CRITICAL."

The woman nodded in agreement. "Then we had best hurry before they get to him."

The mech turned to move away, but stopped, turning back to John and gesturing with an autocannon. "APPLY MEDIGEL TO THIS ONE. HE WILL SURVIVE."

"What? Why?" Both humans spoke at once, their tones ranging from puzzled to confused. John blinked eyes that wouldn't see straight, not sure if he was imagining what he had just heard. He... he would live? Whatever gratitude or joy he might have felt at the statement was robbed by another racking pain that seized his lungs, spasms forcing out a wet and bloody cough that dribbled down his chin.

"I WAS RETURNED FOR MORE THAN WAR. SYMBOLS CANNOT BE ANONYMOUS"

Whatever the mech had meant, it seemed to convince one of the humans, who walked up to him and began applying strips of strips of brown paste to his chest, arms and head, the hiss of warming medigel spreading a numbness throughout his body, quelling the pain. He coughed once, the sensation still tearing at his lungs, but it didn't bring up a spray of blood as it had before. When he was done, the human stepped away to let the mech stomp up to John. With a mechanical hiss, it placed it's autocannon under his chin, pushing his drooping head up to meet it's sensor pod. He had thought the glowing optics menacing before, but now they had gained a terrible light that he could barely comprehend.

"THEY WILL ASK QUESTIONS. YOU WILL TELL THEM THAT I HAVE CAUSED THIS"

"Who... who are you?" John managed to croak between his easing breaths. The machine leaned closer, almost bringing it's optics level to his face.

"**I **AM COMMANDER SHEPARD"

* * *

Something was wrong, he could taste it in the sterile air fed through his atmospheric scrubbers as the last fear riddled face on the bridge crumpled into an agonised rictus of pain, grasping futilely at the stump where his right leg had been. Taloned fingers rummaged in his combat pouch, extracting another blue marked ampule of dextro-amino compatible performance boosters to slap into his suit's dermal injectors. He nearly cracked it in his chemically delayed exhaustion, trying several times to slot it in with trembling fingers before it finally slid down the feeding ramp. Sudden clarity and alertness chased away the fog in his mind as the injector hissed, the ampule's contents swirling awy into his bloodstream, a trick of perception that did nothing good for his aim or judgement. He was getting sloppy, and he knew it, but even the fatigue wasn't enough to keep him from noticing how wrong things were going. This attack had contained only a fraction of hired guns the previous ones had fielded, the fools rushing in terrified panic and firing wildly into the air even before he started picking them off. None of them had tried to seek cover, and even the dimmest of the lot had tried to once the shooting started.

More alarming than the sudden stupidity of the freelancers, the suppressive fire from the merc fortified barricades far in the back had been strangely silent in this rush, and that had _never_ happened before. Something had changed in their plans, that was clear, but what had caused it, and more importantly, what were going to do now? He didn't think they had managed to scrounge up the firepower to level the entire block he had fortified. Omega's architecture had been built tougher than most stations, made necessary by the frequency of open warfare on its streets, the continuous assault of the last three days utterly defacing the facade of his hideout, but still leaving it structurally sound. He had heard a lot of gunfire and explosions coming off in the distance, probably around their staging area was his guess, but he knew better than to expect some kind of last minute help or inter-factional fighting to cause this. Anywhere else, and he might have believed it, but on Omega, even Archangel couldn't be the only source of outright warfare.

"Maybe they all just went home, eh Shepard?" He spoke to no one in particular, listening to his voice echo off blasted and pockmarked walls.

Maybe it was the stimulant abuse, or the fatigue, the grief, or maybe all of them put together in this screwed up portion of the universe, but he was certain he was losing his grip on his sanity as much as he was losing his aim. It'd started with talking to himself at first, a harmless distraction from everything Omega was throwing at him, but then he'd started talking to the air and it wasn't just musing aloud. Thinking of what his former commander would do had become asking aloud what the human would do, and considering that the man was as dead as could be for someone who went down with the Normandy, it really wasn't a very good sign. It hadn't been just the commander who wasn't there that he talked to. Tali, Ashley, even Wrex with all the attitude of a varren with a sore tooth and the manners of one too, though he suspected the krogan would have clobbered him one if he ever found out, he'd ended up talking, or asking the opinions of people who weren't even there. But Shepard wasn't just absent, on some other world or ship doing whatever it was they were doing, Shepard was dead, yet talking to his ghost was a lot more comforting than contemplating what the mercenaries would do if they ever got him alive.

Not that they were going to have the chance, no matter what, he'd seen to that.

He lifted an arm to his face, calling up the omni-tool embedded inside the battered wrist armour. Fitful spikes of data flickered across his screen, taking in micro burst transmissions from the cheap auditory and thermal sensors he had scattered around the hideout and bridge. Most were silent, thanks to the three days of mercenary sponsored redecoration by gunfire, but the few that did show up on his status display as online were barely registering any signal returns, much less something that could have belonged to anything bigger than a varren newborn. No attack yet, and no one was trying to come up with a stealth approach either. That just left something he hadn't thought of yet. It was a cynical thought, but he found that Omega encouraged a lot of that kind of thinking if you didn't want to get weeded out shortly after arriving on station. Unless of course that fireworks show earlier _did_ have something to do with the mercenaries, and probably in not a very nice way. If that was the case, he figured his chances of making it out in one piece went all the way up to pretty damned poor.

He grunted, picking himself up off the floor and drawing the precision rifle to his shoulder as he sighted down it's scope to scan the bridge and barricades beyond. What he saw gave him pause. "Oh... that's not right."

It was difficult to tell with any certainty, but deep under the cover of the barricades, he could just make out flashes of light that could only belong to rapid fire weapons, but nothing actually coming his way. He couldn't actually see any of the mercenaries, but rapidly moving shadows and a whole lot of apparent gunfire told him that _something_ was happening to the mercenaries, and it wasn't something nice. All of a sudden the panicked expressions in the freelancers, their reduced numbers compared to previous assaults and the lack of merc provided suppressive fire fit together like a precision optical sight, no further assembly required. Something that could give the mercenaries a beating in their barricades and push them back, that was a cheerful thought. But if the freelancers were bailing in this direction, and more frightened of whatever that was out there than what was in _here_._.. _he had a very bad feeling that he would be getting a different sort of visit as soon as the mercenaries were cleared out.

Maybe he would luck out this time, or maybe whatever was making a mess of the mercenaries would come gunning for him next. He lowered himself back under the cover of the wall with a tired sigh, limbs aching with fatigue. Whatever it was, merc or bad feeling, worrying about them now in this lull was a waste of time. He wanted to just lie down and sleep, but he needed to get moving or he'd sleep forever, a lot of those traps he'd set earlier weren't really in the best places to-

A bone jarring explosion that left a ringing in his ears startled him awake, talons clutching at the rifle as he brought it up, sweeping for targets before he recognised what it was and what had just happened. _"I dozed off... wait, that didn't sound like any of the trip mines I set, and that explosion came from down in the garage. Nothing should be down there."_

That realisation was all he needed to send him to his feet, bounding down the hallway towards the stairs and the basement access, double checking his fears on the local security datanet and cursing under his breath with what it had shown him. He hated relying on traps and trip mines, any decently smart sapient trained in demolitions work could spot and clear them out, but the bridge and hideout entrance would have to be defended by the infernal devices for just a little while. Never underestimate a krogan unless you want an early death, the old saying went, and he'd learnt to follow it by heart, but Garm had gone a lot further than that. Video feeds showed the kogan mercenary leader striding through a smoking hole in the south basement wall, makeshift bridges and supports serving as boarding ramps as they clambered across from open air transports like the seagoing human pirates he saw in those history holovids.

He punched a talon to his omni-tool, the micro fabricators concealed within faintly humming to life as they began assembling anti-armour attachments for his rifle from it's stored pool of omnigel. He didn't use them very often, the mods put a lot of strain on the rifle and wore it out fast, but he was going to need all the advantages he could get against the Pack, and he even wasn't sure if it was enough. Krogan were tough bastards, and he knew from experience that Garm was the sort that needed a dozen grenades stuffed down his stomach before he actually felt anything. This wasn't the first time he'd tangled with Garm though, and he wouldn't be making the same mistakes he had made then. No more predator and prey games, he was going to go in hard, and hit him with everything he had on call. And if it didn't work, mandibles clicked in anticipation, well he had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He took the freshly minted rifle attachment from it's bay and slapped it into the rifle mount, pausing only long enough to hear the docking clamps seal with a mechanical hiss. This was going to be the one big fight on Omega that would bring down the house. Literally. He fetched up against the wall beside the door, thumbing the override switch.

A hail of fire roared through the opening gap, chewing furniture and blasting holes in the wall. Cackling vorcha laughter whooped above the din of the bullet storm, the vermin hissing promises of pain and death for him, which only went to show how stupid they were. The moment their fire stopped as heat sinks were popped, he made his move, angling the rifle past the doorway and pulling the trigger the moment the remote linked optics showed him a vorcha head. The high powered round pulverized the Pack merc and went on to punch a hole in the fuel tanks of a vorcha flame trooper. The creature howled with fearful realization, struggling with the hissing bomb on its back when it ignited. The ball of fire consumed the vorcha and several of it's friends, turning them into flailing torches and distracting the rest. He dove through the door, ducking behind a utility rig before any of them could recover, or that was the plan. A varren bounded by on all fours, skidding on razor sharp talons as it heeled around to face him, pouncing for the kill with it's jaws open. Releasing the rifle, he grabbed at the predator's jaw and head, holding them away from snapping down on his head but falling under all two hundred kilos of it's muscle. Claws scrabbled at his armour with the jarring shriek of scratching steel until he jerked his talons in opposite directions, spinal bone snapping with a satisfying dry crack.

But he didn't have time to feel that satisfaction, rounds were beginning to spark off the bodywork of the rig as the vorcha recovered from his assault, pouring fire down on his position. He booted the varren out past the rig, and a few of the dimmer witted vorcha fired into it's corpse. Their stupidity bought him time to slide his gun out from cover, the precision rifle cracking once, twice and the two closest vorcha fell back with a missing head and a hole the size of his fist through it's chest. It bought him a little time, but he knew a futile act when he saw one. There were a whole lot of vorcha on that transport, more than he could hold back in this exposed area, and the krogan hitters were coming fast. No way to get to those blast shutters now, he needed a new plan. He kept moving, another varren leaping over the utility rig to land where he had been a moment before, eyes puzzled until it caught sight of him, snarling as it turned. The precision rifle cracked again, armour piercing fragmentation slug coring the animal from fang to tail in a stinking shower of viscera.

"We kill you Archangel, Blood Pack strong!" The vorcha howled, skittering forward under the cover of poorly aimed fire. He edged around the corner of the vehicle, blasting another fist sized hole in the advancing mercenaries with a crack of his rifle, but another one took it's place, stepping on the thrashing corpse without pause, laughing in their cackling voices. "Vorcha strong, kill Archangel, eat Archangel head!"

"I've heard better dinner plans than that," he muttered to himself, ducking low as a few shots rang off the rig's battery housing above his head, the slugs tearing open the metal casing and exposing the power cells inside. Getting an idea, he pulled a grenade from his pouch, silently thanked the human engineer who had come up with the centuries old design, and tossed it in the general direction of the loudmouth. It went off with an ear splitting bang and a blinding flash of light, eliciting pained howls from the vorcha their fire going completely wild as they stumbled blindly without taking their fingers off the trigger. Taking the opportunity, he leaped to the utility rig's driving cab, yanking open the hatch and stabbing a talon at the startup button. The engine whined to life and he smashed the accelerator controls with the butt of his rifle, the gears grinding into motion as a burst of fire smashed into the driver's cab, nearly taking off his head in the process. He scuttled away from the moving vehicle, keeping low and ducking between the heavy machinery in the garage as the no longer disorientated vorcha screeched and gave chase, not even stopping when he lobbed another flash bang grenade behind him. Their mistake.

The ear splitting crack and flash of light was rewarded with the heavy thump of tripping bodies and reflexive fire that went nowhere but the walls and the backs of their own kind who had been faster than the rest. That second was all the opportunity he needed, spinning around and firing his rifle in the same heartbeat. The superdense tungsten shard melted through tough metal housing like wax, shearing through the thin power cell casings and depositing several thousand centigrade of thermal energy in one searing instant. Contrary to holovids, most power storage devices never blew up when overloaded or overheated, their design making such reactions physically impossible. But modern science could never really stop a runaway thermal reaction, especially when it came in the form of high density chemical based energy sources. The power cells didn't explode, they ignited, gouts of thousand centigrade chemical fire spurting out in every direction as the utility rig lumbered past the blinded vorcha, instantly incinerating the stumbling bodies into wailing clouds of ash or slowly crushing them under it's broad wheels. Even protected by distance and his armour, the air boiled around him as more and more cells ignited into tongues of steel slagging flame, heating the utility rig until it glowed a sullen red and started to sag under it's weight.

He continued to fall back, picking off the vorcha who had advanced past the flames, but keeping a sharp lookout all the same. Where were the krogans? The Pack always followed up with krogan shock troops after expending their vorcha.

"ARCHANGEL!"

He turned at the sound, ducking just as a distorted ball of blue tinged air sailed over his head, the insubstantial projectile slamming into a steel reinforced support and crumpling the structure with a shockwave that knocked him flat. He didn't give himself the luxury of time to get back the breath knocked out of him and just kept rolling, lining up a shot on a familiar, hated face and pulled the trigger. A vorcha suddenly thrown in the way absorbed most of the hit, body crumpling as a fist sized hole was blown through it's stomach. The slug continued on it's trajectory, punching through thick krogan armour and hide to burst out the other side in a spray of yellow blood, but the merc only smiled viciously as he tossed aside the vorcha corpse and pointed an oversized shotgun his way.

"You thought you were smart enough with those mechs didn't you?" Garm challenged, the Blood Pack leader's shotgun boomed like a cannon, sending thousands of stinging shards his way. Kinetic shields absorbed the impacts, flechettes sizzling away to nothingness in a display that outlined him with a constellation of sparks. Archangel rolled behind a pillar, slapping a fresh heat sink into his rifle, and taking that breath he'd been missing. A warning alarm blared in his hearing diaphragm, announcing how close his shields were to collapse. The pillar nearly crumpled to dust as a fresh biotic shockwave slammed into it, sending chunks flying everywhere as Garm stomped closer, ducking past one of the flames from the melting utility rig. "Not smart enough. All they did was get rid of the trash and that whining salarian merc. Gave me a clear room to rip your head off and use it as a decoration. I'll have to thank you after that."

Salarian merc... Jaroth was dead? The Eclipse commander? And what mechs was he talking about? He'd almost let that revelation stun him, but another boom from Garm's shotgun and the rapidly diminishing pillar kept his legs pumping under him, pulling the only grenade left in his pouch while he dived out the basement entrance, ducking behind the thick walls as the doors hissed shut. Most hand tossed grenades would be useless against heavy armour, much less of the krogan variety, but he kept this one for just such an occasion. Instead of arming it, he placed it besides the door, angling the cap towards the entrance and making a dash for the upper landing stairwell. He'd just made it there when the doors cycled open again, and a pair of krogans burst through with a bellow of rage.

Archangel's rifle turned that bellow into a scream of pain as it cracked again, the round punching the top off the grenade and spraying it's mixture of burning aluminium powder and iron oxide onto the mercenaries, the searing particulate cloud adhering to the crevices of the armour and eyeplates where they began burning through them. One smouldering mercenary immediately fell, writhing on the floor as he futilely tried to stamp out the flames, but the other ignored the immolation of his armour and flesh, racking his glowing shotgun and pulling the trigger to no effect, the firing mechanism flash fused into a mass of molten parts. Throwing the useless weapon aside, the krogan mercenary ducked his shoulder and charged, six hundred kilos of flaming muscle barrelling down on him. He rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding the fiery battering ram as it struck the wall hard enough to leave an impression on it's steel surface, turning on him with a murderous expression. Even concealed by a helmet, he had no trouble imagining the expression melt away to one of puzzlement as it's movements were halted by a rifle jammed into it's neck join. He pulled the trigger.

The armour piercing slug punched through flexible ballistic cloth like paper, instantly fragmenting into a hundred high velocity needles inside the krogan's neck, easily ripping through muscle, sinew and bone, taking it's head off in a shower of steaming blood. The body jerked, still swaying upright as it's limbs trashed in front of it, burning metal oxides cooking it's dying organs with the sickly sweet stench of frying meat. A second later it's muscles finally succumbed to the incredible heat and the charred body toppled over, nearly squashing him under it's bulk as he scrabbled out of the way.

"Running Archangel?" The familiar taunt had his rifle up and firing on pure reflex, but the krogan emerging from the basement had anticipated the movement, smoothly sidestepping the round with a grace that belied his bulk. He brought up the shotgun. "Come down and I'll make it quick." He punctuated the growl with a roar of his shotgun, scoring the wall with craters and shredding the krogan corpse into a dozen flaming gibbets. Archangel ducked and sprinted up the stairs, keeping the stairway panels between him and the shotgun as he ran upwards. Garm chased him with the shotgun, racking a new shot as he blasted another steel lined panel into splinters and shrapnel. "Or you can try to run and make it entertaining."

"Oh I'll give you 'fun' alright you overgrown vorcha." Archangel muttered between breaths, sliding the last few feet as another part of the stairway wall behind him disintegrated under a storm of buzzing flechettes. Hearing the screeching of vorcha, he pulled out his sidearm, sliding it past the balcony wall and pulling the trigger as fast as he could pull it. The heavy pistol bucked in his hand, pelting the krogan mercenary leader and vorcha with a hail of slugs that fizzled against the krogan's kinetic barriers, but punched through the cobbled together armour the vorcha wore, sending them skittering into cover. He hooked his foot behind a wall support, pulling himself away and upright just as the air around the wall he'd been behind turned blue and collapsed in on itself, the biotic field effect close enough that he felt his helmet seals crack under gravitic pressure.

Reaching the access way to his snipers perch, he popped above cover, slamming a talon into the door controls while the other let the precision rifle fall against his combat harness, punching a kill code on his omni-tool. He'd never used them before, always carried the risk of hurting the innocent, but there were no innocents here and it was now or never. The display turned red and the building shook with the simultaneous detonation of the dozen omni-directional mines he had hidden by the main doorways. Explosive charges ignited, high energy pressure waves accelerating pusher plates and sending thousands of red hot steel ball bearings hissing at fatal velocities everywhere. Vorcha hissed and howled as their armour was perforated in hundreds of places, pulverising their bodies, shattering flamer fuel canisters and igniting their volatile loads in an instant of kinetic carnage. Garm bellowed in anger as his shields collapsed amidst the metal storm, blazing flaming fuel landing on his arm where it cheerily sizzled away. Taking the chance, he popped out from cover, bringing his rifle to bear on the Blood Pack leader, but as fast as he was, the krogan was just as fast, burying the burning fist into the wall while he levelled the shotgun one handed. Both weapons fired simultaneously.

The dense armour piercing slug sliced through the air, ripping through thick krogan fingers and shotgun trigger driven up by the recoil, ricocheting off his armoured wrist to bury itself in the wall instead of punching through Garm's brain pan. The flechettes hit a microsecond later, a few collapsing his kinetic barriers in a display of electric fireworks while the rest scored hits on his armour, tearing long gouges on the plate and knocking him onto his backside. Cracks spider-webbed all over his helmet visor, the embedded smart optics dying with a whine of failing power systems as the tactical displays went dark. Auto-safety systems disengaged the clamps and he ripped off the disabled helmet, scuttling through the door of his snipers perch as Garm pulled his fist out from the wall in a shower of dust, the flames already extinguished. The krogan grinned at Archangel, letting the mangled remains of his left hand drop the ruined shotgun, leaping up the stairs without the slightest sign of pain as the familiar blue fire of a biotic charge coalesced around him.

The door slammed shut just as the blue light reformed itself into a ball, slamming into the reinforced portal with enough force that it groaned and bulged inwards. Garm's gravelly voice rumbled through the sealed door, punctuating his words with another biotic blast that bent the thick metal portal even further in with a pop of heavy bolts flying from their mountings. "You can't hide in there forever Archangel, and there's no where to run."

But he was already moving away from the door, taking up a piece of gear he thought he'd never use, not and live anyway, attaching the hooks to his harness while the other went around a hooked bolt driven into the wall. He called up the omni-tool, activating the last kill code still reading as active on his display, the only one that mattered now. The command display vanished, displaying only a short time limit before it too flickered out. He didn't need an active chronometer to tell how long, his head would keep the time just fine. Twenty seconds, well past time for plan B. Risking a look past the flechette riddled battlements, he blinked at the sight. The mercenary barricades were a smoking crater in the ground, with a few more bodies lying on the ground than there were before. A pair of humans dressed in white and black were advancing towards the bridge with pistols drawn, a contingent of LOKI and YMIR mechs flanking them as they opened fire across the empty span into his hideout.

_Fifteen seconds._

Strangely, one of the YMIR mechs wasn't painted in the bone white scheme that every mech ever manufactured had. The urban grey colours and singular red stripe down it's shoulder was reminiscent of the armour an old friend and painful memory wore, but he dismissed it as the act of another self important owner, trying to make their machine look more dangerous. The mechs Garm had been talking about no doubt, shooting at the vorcha almost certainly, but friend or just a common enemy? He had no way of knowing, and the question became academic when the door exploded in a spray of exploding bolts and battered steel plates. The rifle came up, snapping off a shot that left the barrel glowing an angry red.

_Eight seconds._

"No place to go, and no more friends Archangel." Garm stepped through the wrecked doorway, the blue aura of a biotic field surrounding his frame stopping and crushing Archangel's armour piercing slug against it's own kinetic energy. He smiled a toothy grin at the smoking barrel of the precision rifle, secure in the knowledge that it's heat sink was overloaded, flexing his mangled fist in front of the vigilante. The other brought a borrowed assault rifle to bear on him. "This time, you're mine."

_Three seconds._

"No Garm," Archangel stated very calmly, more than he had felt these past few days, "you're mine."

_Zero._

* * *

"Holy- get back, get back!" Jacob yelled, darting behind a bridge support as the scarred hideout shook with the deep roar of an under-surface explosion, shattering glass and setting the entire bridge span to shaking with a groan of tormented steel. Miranda followed suit, turning and sprinting off the unstable structure. The mechs came to a halt, turning uncertainly as EDI relayed new orders to them, but Shepard remained still, clamping down onto the bridge with both feet as it shook. And then the next explosion ripped through the station, a pillar of flame roaring skyward and sending debris of all sizes flying everywhere, scorched vorcha and krogan body parts bouncing with absurdly cheery sounds past their force. The explosion generated a pressure wave so strong it nearly knocked Shepard off his feet, fist sized chunks of concrete and steel beginning to rain down on them, bouncing off kinetic barriers and crushing LOKI mechs where they stood with a shriek of dying electronics and twisting metal while Miranda and Jacob sheltered behind the meagre cover of the bridge supports. Shepard's own shields protested at the onslaught of deadly debris, taking the brunt of the hits as he hunkered down to minimise his profile. White hot flames billowed out from the doors and windows, consuming oxygen in greedy tongues that created a small gale of negative pressure, sending clouds of thick oily smoke into the sky. A moment passed by in shocked silence, then Shepard's communications circuit lit up.

_"Patel here. Whatever you did down there Commander, you had better stop doing it. Air traffic has gone crazy everywhere, and there's chunks of building flying around in the null-g flight corridors. I'm already getting reports of mid-air collisions, and I don't think I'll be able to avoid hitting something if it gets busier down there. Keep a sky eye out for falling traffic."_

He didn't reply immediately, not even as the aftershocks quietened and the rumble of groaning bridge supports began to quieten down. He didn't have anything to reply with as he watched the building sagged and groaned it's final death cry, the flames already lessening in their intensity as Omega's automated fire suppression systems kicked in, bottling the crumbling structure with atmosphere trapping mass effect fields. But his attention wasn't drawn to the flames, it focused instead on the lone figure descending down it's cracking walls on a rappelling line. There wasn't any way to be sure, but that face, optics whirred and clicked, and it grew ten times larger in his vision. If he had lips, he would have cracked a smile as the image resolved into a very familiar turian face. The old gripes of a lifetime ago seemed fresh and new; tired of the rules, always being forced to let the suspects get away when red tape got in the way, believing in a justice that the rules should bend around, not be bent by it, it was fitting that of all the people in the universe, he would become the infamous vigilante of Omega.

_"NOT ME. ARCHANGEL."_

The turian swung the last few meters of his descent, kicking away from the smoking ruin and letting go of his line, the lower gravity of Omega carrying him outside it's mass effect field where he tumbled to the ground. Shepard took an involuntary step forward, but the turian known as Archangel sprang to his feet, rifle already out despite being vastly outnumbered and out in the open. "You want to continue this," he coughed out between breaths, loud enough to have been directed at the two Cerberus operatives, wisps of oily smoke still clinging to his burnt armour, "never know what other surprises I might have hidden away."

_"It doesn't appear that Archangel believes us to be mercenaries commander, but not friendlies either."_ Miranda cautioned from her behind piece of cover, a slight smug tone entering her voice as she continued, _"Shall I try to convince him, or do you want to do it?"_

He took a half step forward as a means of reply, but not to her. Archangel kept his gun straight and level, covering the two Cerberus members, likely guessing that they controlled the mechs.

"I DO KNOW ONE SURPRISE." He boomed, startling the turian from the way his mandibles flared, but the rifle never twitched. "I DID NOT EXPECT TO FIND YOU HERE GARRUS"

The mandibles flared again, puffing open several times in quick succession before he spoke again. "Nice trick," he replied dryly, "learning my name when nobody else seems to have figured it out in a place like this, but speaking through a mech isn't going to make me trust your intentions any more than I would a hungry varren. You haven't shot at me yet, that's something in your favour, so why don't you come out and we can have a civil chat to see who you really are and what you want with me, seeing how everybody else seems to be dead at the moment."

It wasn't quite the reunion he was hoping for, but given the circumstances, he couldn't have hoped for much better either. The sensor pod swivelled in an approximation of a gestured denial, an act that felt particularly unnatural when he had to consciously think of doing it to make it happen.

"I DO NOT FORGET THE FACES OF THOSE WHO FOUGHT WITH ME AGAINST SAREN"

Garrus flicked his eyes a little, finally deciding to put down the rifle, though he only went let it slide off target as he rose to his feet, mandibles quickly working in rapid succession. "Ohh, now that does bring back memories, but it's kind of funny how I can't seem to remember anyone three meters tall, spoke like a mech and looked like one. I don't know what game you're playing here, but if you've figured out who I am and what I did, a good bit of detective work there, then you should have figured out that I don't like games so cut the crap and tell me who you really are."

"GARRUS. IT IS ME" He spread his weapon arms wide, knowing that it wouldn't work, but hoping that it would either way. "SHEPARD. WE WERE ON THE NORMANDY"

To his surprise, Garrus laughed, a chuckle full of bitterness that didn't carry far or last long. "Oh, now you've really got me. You must think my brains were cooked a little in that explosion don't you? Give up the charade, whoever you are, I'm not that far gone yet. Shepard's a ghost and I should take your head clean off for trying to insult his memory by telling me this mechanical mockery you've got here is him, but right now I'm too tired to care." The turian focused his eyes on the mech for the first time voice hardening as his eyes and fingers twitched almost uncontrollable, sending an alarm ringing in Shepard's mind, "So if you're not going to start shooting at me, either you get to the point and tell me what you want with me or let me through."

_"I don't think Archangel is going to be convinced any time soon commander. I imagine the siege has left him significantly paranoid of anyone he does not immediately recognize, and to be frank commander, you are quite unrecognizable. Perhaps if you were to allow me...."_

_"NO. AND I AM AWARE"_

He snapped back at Miranda, feeling a little annoyed at her small dig. Stimulant overdose, it had to be, he'd seen far too many marines take them when the situation got desperate to mistake the nervous twitch that overdosing on combat stimulants left you with, faster, quicker, but also more paranoid. And he'd been trapped for almost three days now, did that mean three days of combat stimulants? He didn't know, and he didn't want to risk finding out the wrong way if he pushed the already on edge turian over.

"WE DO HAVE-"

Shepard broke off, alerted by a sudden flash of light and a panicked voice on his communications circuit.

_"Commander! Get out of there! The gunship is heading right for you!_"

The flash of light resolved into a brightly sparkling projectile, riding on a plume of fire. He turned away, breaking into motion and shouting the only thing he could.

"GET DOWN"

The missile struck the bridge mid-span, blasting apart supports in a shower of burning debris that scythed down a few of the slower LOKI mechs. Garrus dove away from the bridge, avoiding the worst of the shrapnel as the structure began to groan alarmingly, the explosion tearing through critical load bearing parts. The world seemed to tilt as the bridge began to break up, shattered edges falling into the abyss below while the remainder groaned and bent down under the weight of the mechs, LOKI's losing their balance and sliding down the smooth surface to plunge off the edge. He kept running, each stomp of his multi-ton frame shaking the bridge a little more and bringing it closer to collapsing entirely before he finally cleared past the threatened section to land on solid ground. The other YMIR nearly followed suit, engaging it's magnetic clamps at the last instant to secure it's hold on the collapsing bridge before spinning it's sensor pod in confusion, searching for threats with it's autocannons when an A-61 Mantis gunship roared overhead, another missile striking the machine in the chest and blasting it's smoking body off the bridge.

"Archangel!" The gunship's external speakers boomed with the voice of the Blue Sun's leader, every word dripping with rage and malice. "You think you can screw with the Blue Suns?"

Garrus popped out from his impromptu cover, making for the ruins of his hideout as the gunship turned on it's axis, spitting death from it's autocannons as it began chasing the turian. Puffs of smoke exploded on the ground around Garrus, and Shepard could only watch helplessly as the gunship's autocannon shredded his kinetic barriers, knocking the vigilante off his feet where he stumbled under the protective overhang of a fallen wall. Shepard brought up his own autocannon, knowing it would never do enough damage to stop the gunship before it was too late when he paused, furiously calculating a new plan with both organic mind and inorganic computational power, sending a command through his communication circuits the instant he had come to a conclusion.

_"JACOB. MIRANDA. BIOTICS. NOW"_

"What? To bring down the gunship?" Jacob looked at him with utter confusion, forgetting to use the com lines in his surprise, but Miranda's expression lit up with sudden understanding, though her lips compressed in a familiar line of disapproval which probably meant she was thinking he was being a lunatic. She was right, but he didn't care.

_"NO"_

He turned, myomer bundles whining as they rapidly pulsed between contraction and expansion, sending his legs running down the ruined end of the bridge, hoping that the plan would work and not drop him into space. As he ran, the gunship immediately cut thrust, bringing it's weapons low enough to fire through the opening.

_"PROVIDE A LIFT"_

With an electric crackle of a full capacitative discharge shunting into his legs, he jumped. In that same instant, the gunship let loose a volley of rockets, blasting Garrus's shelter in a cloud of fire and dust.

"GARRUS"

The booming sound of his voice alerted the gunship pilot, thrusters flaring as it levelled off, turning to face him, but the the blue tinged nimbus of a biotic field had already enveloped him, lowering his mass at the exact moment his feet pressed down one last time on the crumbling bridge, the kinetic energies on his suddenly lighter frame propelling him skywards over the chasm. The world seemed to loop as he partly left the station's gravitic fields, reasserting itself a heartbeat later as drag and gravity on the rest of his body dragged him back down to Omega as a screaming missile to land on top of the gunship. Composite armour plating buckled with a loud crunch under his sudden landing on its hull but remained whole, a testament to the toughness of the Mantis's engineering, the impact driving the gunship down to dip dangerously low to the ground. And then the gunship engines screamed with increasing thrust, pulling out of the nose dive as the pilot threw the craft into a violent roll to dislodge him from his perch. Magnetic clamps hummed with electrical power at the same instant, anchoring Shepard firmly onto the platforms outer hull as he leaned forward, looming over the canopy with the promise of death.

_"Commander, what are you doing?" _Jacob's voice crackled on the communications line, the man breaking cover to stare incredulously as Shepard clung onto the wildly bucking gunship.

_"CALL THE SHUTTLE. PRIORITY IS TO RECOVER ARCHANGEL"_

There was no time to think of anything else. Shepard leaned forward, ignoring the ground team as he lifted his autocannon arm and drove the weapon barrel first into the cockpit canopy. Glass cracked and metal framework buckled, but the canopy held. The gunship engines howled at an even higher pitch, discarding evasive manoeuvres for raw power that shot them away from the ground and into Omega's skyscape on plumes of superheated plasma. The disorientating lurch of the world turning on it's head struck Shepard again as they left Omega's gravitic field, but he kept his focus and rage on the canopy, ignoring the flares on his kinetic barriers as debris from the earlier explosion smashed into them, every impact making the gunship shudder. He pulled back, driving his autocannon arm at the cracks in the canopy canopy with sheer brute force and punching through in a shower of shattering plexiglass that were immediately blown away by the roar of decompression. Gun mounted cameras gave him a glimpse of a shocked batarian face, eyes widening for that one fraction of a second of realization as air whipped out of the cockpit. The autocannon roared, and the Blue Suns leader vanished in a puff of pink mist and armour fragments.

Too late, he recognized his mistake.

At this range, there flechettes would not stop with the batarian, and the projectiles ripped through the batarian without slowing, tearing into the cockpit controls which exploded in a shower of electrical sparks. The Mantis went wild, thrusters howling with fitful bursts of uncontrolled plasma plumes as lightning arced through it's cockpit, still intact consoles flaring to life before dying in burst of electronic garbage. The craft fell roared skyward, hurtling uncontrollably through the cityscape of omega, on board emergency VI attempting to compensate for a load it had never been designed to carry with controls that didn't respond. Floating debris, spiralling towers and screaming aircars that tried to get out of the way flared and wind-milled in his vision, more than one clipping the craft or his body in an impact that sent the rampant gunship into an even wilder spin despite the efforts of the stabilization thrusters. Stress alarms blared in his mind, warning of near failures of the magnetic clamps embedded in his feet and joints, the incredible g-forces threatening to rip the reinforced anchor points apart.

_"Commander, you have to let go! You're body might survive a raw drop, but not if the gunship hits something!"_

Before he could take Miranda's urgent advice, a tower spire suddenly flashed into Shepard's view, rapidly growing into alarming size. He bent his body low, digging autocannon even further into the cockpit in a desperate attempt to anchor his hold on the gunship, frantically calculating the shrinking distance and trajectory. He would make it, barely, but he couldn't contain the fear as the spire screamed into his vision as an unyielding tower of reinforced steel. A microsecond before the critical instant, the gunship's thrusters fired, attempting to stabilize it's flight, gaining a foot of fatal altitude.

Servo mounted optical systems met unyielding reinforced steel designed to take the impact of crashing vehicles. Kinetic barriers burst into life, absorbing the immense energy of the impact in a single moment of coruscating blue white light, distributing their entire kinetic load evenly throughout his body. But barriers designed to take the impact of armour piercing cannon slugs couldn't compensate for the differences in velocity and masses of the both Shepard and the tower, flaring, holding and collapsing with a high pitch shriek of tearing air in that one instant, the tower smashing into his head. For a single moment, Shepard's entire body yielded towards the vast differences in velocity as his sensor head struck the tower, pulling away from the gunship. But his grip in the cockpit and magnetic clamps held tight onto the screaming gunship, creating two opposing forces contending against each other with his neck as the stress point. Shepard's optics crumpled instantly in a shower of reinforced glass and sparking electronics, armoured shell peeling backwards like a flower as the servos shrieked in protest before snapping free, his head sheared off by the impact to vanish into Omega's darkness as his decapitated torso vomited electricity and hydraulic fluids.

Shepard felt jarring impact, the spire looming impossibly close, the sizzling air, his sight vanishing into static.

It hurt. For the first time since his revival, he felt pain like he had never experienced before. A searing spear seemed to stab at his brain and spine in every single nerve ending, flaying his mind with overwhelming torment. Coherent thought fled as his consciousness dipped and vanished, chased into the oblivion by blaring alerts of catastrophic system damage.

_Alert. Communications systems critically damaged._

_Alert. Unable to detect sensor array. Primary motor control actuators inoperative._

_Alert._

_Alert._

Consciousness returned with the incessant drone of status alerts, warning him of the damage inflicted to his cybernetic body, and the darkness where his senses had once been. No pain, no sight, no sense of touch, the pain's absence was far more disconcerting than it's presence. He almost flailed in his panic, marine training kicking in a moment before he surrendered to the fear. He could remember the instructor's clinically detached advice. Steady breathing, calm the heart and analyze what you had however you can. And it dawned on him that it was completely useless. He had no heart, no lungs which to draw breath, nothing but his thoughts in this empty space of nothing. Oddly, that realization did not disconcert him very much.

The spire had crushed his head, stripping him of all the senses that had been clustered inside before the VI had shut down power to the ruined connections, but not his brain, he was sure of that. If he could think, then it was still intact, he was not dead, and he would continue to take that one step back from the brink as long as he could. His first instinct was to move his limbs, a holdover from when he had a flesh and blood body that he pushed down with a twinge of regret. Servo motors and armour plate didn't have tactile senses, and there was no telling if doing so would risk his grip on the gunship... if he was still holding onto it. Instead he called up the communication circuits, but the mental command brought nothing to his consciousness except the memory of a notification written directly into his mind.

_Alert. Communication systems critically damaged._

If he had lungs, and a nose from which to do it with, he would have let out a withheld breath. No sight, no sense touch, effectively mute, he was effectively locked in a box just waiting for someone to pick him up, and there was nothing he could do about it. Not directly. The transponders built into the mechanized body would still be active, that much the status updates told him. If the gunship he was still clinging onto didn't crash into Omega. Not a cheery thought to have as he idled in the gulf of nothing, deaf, blind and mute. He tried keeping track of the time by mentally counting the seconds, but without a single reference to base his estimate on, he lost track soon after. Had they recovered Garrus? Was he even still alive after that rocket salvo, or was the turian dead and his actions made futile by a difference of seconds? Not knowing was as frustrating as being unable to do anything about his current condition and he found himself wondering if Miranda's unspoken objection was correct. No, he had taken the best chance there was to bring down that gunship before it could kill Garrus. Coming to the aid of his old squad mate was worth the price he had paid, no matter how successful he was in the attempt, and that was something he could live with.

_"-der, can you hear this? It's Joker. We're trying a laser pulse on your gun cameras since your radio's dead. EDI says your vitals are ok, but it doesn't look good from where I'm sitting. Come on Commander, you'd better not be playing dead on us again."_

Hearing someone, anyone, even if it was in the monotones of the machine's text parser, Shepard laughed, or tried to. There was no voice, and nothing to tell if he was still able to talk. He focused his thoughts, looking for a way to communicate in return. It was like fumbling in the dark for a key that had no shape, but he managed to do it, pulsing his thoughts with intermittent flashes of the targeting laser embedded in his autocannon.

_"I AM ALIVE. BEYOND THAT I DO NOT KNOW"_

_"I'd say you were in a whole lot of trouble too, but I think you've figured that out already, being strapped like a magnet to a dead gunship, floating in space all quiet like. Didn't turn out so well the last time that happened you know? ____Don't worry though, the Normandy's coming around to pick you up before you drop into the sun or anything like that. I hear Miranda and Jacob picked up Archangel too, they're on the way back now. It's Garrus right? Pole in the ass guy? He..."_ The helmsman trailed off in midsentence, the first time he had ever known Joker to ever do so. _"He's in a bad way, though I haven't actually seen how bad, they're saying he was fed a rocket or something. Chawkwas is prepping the sick bay for him. Though on the bright side, he probably isn't as bad off as you are, stuck on that derelict gunship like a fridge magnet. An advantage to being you, I mean all those redundant parts..."_

_"WHAT DO YOU MEAN"_

_"Well commander, I always said you'd lose your head over something one of these days. All that bullshit with the council and Udina? Bound to happen eventually you know? Just didn't expect it to be so literal."_

* * *

"What a goddamned day this has turned out to be. The last time I ever show up to watch the mercs get themselves bloody killed."

The door to his cabin hissed open, and Zaeed stumped through, pausing only long enough to open a med-kit and grab the booze stashed inside before flopping on a packing crate. The twinge in his arm from hanging like a fruit over Omega's lousy sky kept hammering at him until he drowned it with a swig from the bottle. Pansies fixed their bug bites with their fancy medigel and automated surgeons, but Zaeed found no better painkiller in the universe than a bottle of tequila. His armour had protected him from most of the blast, but it had singed him pretty bad enough that it goddamn _stung_. If he ever found that mech again, there was going to be hell to pay for that. Didn't come close to the grudge he had with his ex-mate, but compared to that son of a bitch, nothing else really did. Still, he'd never let a grudge go unpaid. Rage was the pick-your-arse-up that got you going no matter what the universe was pouring down your hole.

Zaeed was a merc, one of the best, he knew professionalism from a hole in the ground when most two bit mercs couldn't find their own arses if you clubbed them over the head with it. But the mess back there was bloody _artistry_, if your preferred brush was destruction. The grey YMIR and it's mech puppets had gone to work on the mercs like a vibro cutter through a month old Hanar corpse, leaving a whole lot of body parts and craters when they were done with the massacre. He didn't think he could find a single merc left around those parts who was more than a lump of dead meat and crushed composite armour plate. Hell, Omega had gone quiet for the first time he could ever remember after that mech was through, and Omega _never_ went quiet. If that was the sort of mechs the corporate types were going to be coming out with, he and a lot of mercs were going to be cut out of the lions share of the bloodwork that kept the likes of him going. Replacing the lot of them with an overweight tech head and a line of lock step marching mechs. He didn't know if he liked that, but he sure as hell didn't like what that one particular mech had done to him.

Catching his own blast charge and feeding it back to him was bloody genius work for a VI, far too smart to be fancy bits of code monkey work in a clean room somewhere. Only luck and a bit of preparation with a drop line had kept him from splattering his brains all out over goddamn Omega of all places. The one advantage to hanging from the line under the railing had been getting a window seat to the mop up action that followed. Textbook slaughter it had been, and if that wasn't the same mech riding on Tarak's gunship like a holovid cowboy, he'd eat his glass eye. Prototype combat software his arse, whatever pack of lies the suits had been feeding Tarak and the rest, there was nothing experimental with that mech, it moved like a veteran, acted like one, and took a hell of a lot of hardened mercs down like swatting flies with a shotgun. And it had a whole platoon of Eclipse mechs acting at it's beck and call, never forget that. He was no tech with a head crammed full of fancy gear, but you don't live a merc life long as he did without picking up a few tricks about security mechs as common as these. Reprogramming the whole lot in minutes, directing them in a fight like they were seasoned shooters rather than idiot machines, not even a Quarian with their fancy cybernetic interfaces could accomplish that. There was going to be a lot of sweating all round if that YMIR ever got into the business of taking over mech factories. It'd start a bloody revolution.

Whatever that mech was, he had a gut feeling it was going to be bad news for everyone, and a lot of credits to earn if that mech turned out to be a rampant AI. Probably even more if that kid was really on the ball and not off his rocker with shell shock. "Dead men coming back to life as a mech? Gotta be piss crazy to swallow that story." He snorted aloud at the thought.

He'd had to admit, that was a hell of a trick for the kid, not getting his arse shot off or just lucky getting picked to leave a message behind. And he'd gotten the message alright, big goddamn hero the holovids had been feeding the universe at large, dead, and then not so dead two years later and wanting a lot of dead mercs. He'd heard a lot of unbelievable stories in his time, practically lived a few of them himself, but coming back from the dead? That was a kids story right there. He'd put his two credits on the kid getting knocked on the head one too many times, and screwed up whatever message the suits wanted to leave behind. Not his business anyway, so he'd left the kid to fend for himself, drooling and babbling like any other shell shocked crazy he'd seen on a hundred other worlds. "That's a mental case there just waiting for shrink to take a crack at with an ice pick."

Whatever screw up was supposed to get that message, if it came out wrong, that was no skin off his nose.

The beep of his omni-tool made him scowl, but he cracked open an eye to take a look at it. The perpetual grimace on his face took an odd turn as the message on his display turned out to be a tender for his services, by Cerberus no less. Now what was this? He leaned forward, taking another pull at the bottle before getting down to the business of reading. He didn't have a broker like most freelance mercs did, didn't need the grief that came with trying to split proceeds on what was fair. Leeches like that could burn in hell for all he cared. Nobody contacted him unless it was on business, and only the serious ones found out how to get in touch. It meant having to go through a few more channels to confirm his employment, but it was worth the trouble since nobody would call unless they had serious credits on hand. Cerberus now, they had the credits, but they held long grudges too. Fifty notches on Jessie's rifle butt belonged to Cerberus agents who got in his way or were targets in his previous jobs, a practice he kept up even after the old girl gave up the ghost.

Reading the tender though, he didn't think there was going to be a fifty first notch on Jessie this time round. He raised an eyebrow at the mission description, and swore quietly to himself. They must be having a laugh at him, thinking he'd take on a mission like this. It was a one way trip to getting your brains blown out, fighting the collectors if you ever found the elusive bastards, but the credits promised as the half down was a whole lot more than his going rate, the kind of money he could burn through for years without breaking a sweat. He kept on reading, contenting himself with the occasional snort as he ran across a few of the rules that would govern his employment.

It could be a trap. Hell, it likely was, Cerberus didn't make their reputation on being the forgiving sort, he knew every single trick they used to when it came to getting even, and baiting him with an offer was a trick older than dirt. Still, that was a lot of credits they were putting on the line, and all he'd have to do was mark his acceptance of their terms in the same contract send it back, and get his half down retainer fee. He didn't know if they were hoping to really get him in or if they were being goddamn stupid by giving him a chance to just take the credits and skip Omega. Or maybe they did their homework, he'd made a reputation for doing what he'd been paid to do after all. Taking the half down and running would hurt his rep a lot more than taking it and screwing up the mission. His eyebrow shot up in surprise as he kept reading though, Cerberus _had_ done their homework. If he took up the contract, they'd give him the planet where that slimy bastard Vido was holing up, and provide the free ride there to boot. A chance to finally use that bullet he'd been saving up for just this occasion was worth a krogan's weight in eezo, and then some. Rage was a hell of an anaesthetic, but revenge was the one thing he'd been planning for all these years. He just had to say yes.

He took another swig of tequila, letting it burn down his throat for a while. He decided at last, sending a perfunctory acknowledgement to the contract tender and watched his bank account gain a few extra zeros. A few seconds later, a fresh message arrived, giving him a planet name and coordinates. For the first time in a very long time, Zaeed smiled.

* * *

**COMEDY SECTION**

Aggressive Marketing

"Who... who are you?" John managed to croak between his easing breaths. The machine leaned closer, almost bringing it's optics level to his face.

"**I** AM COMMANDER SHEPARD"

An autocannon gestured in the vague direction of a bullet ridden storefront, it's signage more holes than sign while fires burned through it's doors and windows. Bodies lay sprawled around it's entrance, many of them torn to shreds by the bullets and explosions that had raged throughout the district moments ago. With a loud groan of collapsing masonry, the building fell in on itself, crumbling to dust and debris.

"AND **THIS **IS MY FAVORITE STORE ON OMEGA"

* * *

A/N: Garrus appears, and proceeds to show the world that he doesn't need a cyborg assault body to deliver a good ass kicking while Shepard loses his head on a workout. If you ask me, the game just didn't do Garrus justice for someone who's held out a one man siege for three days nonstop.

Another chapter down. I wasn't supposed to release this until the buffer chapters were done, but since 04 was a cliffhanger, I figured it was only fair that I release this one. That said, there will probably be a delay until the next chapter is ready for release.


	6. Chapter 06: Old Friends, New Friends

**Chapter 06: Old Friends, New Friends**

_Five Days Ago_

He was fidgeting like an adolescent on his fifteenth cycle, waiting for the results of his first military posting to be made public.

Garrus had seen and done a lot of things since he'd left the Turian military, first at C-Sec, then chasing after Saren all over the galaxy, and then his time on Omega. Every little incident had left him a little bit more cynical, a little harder so he could face the screwed up universe when nobody else wanted to. Somewhere along the line, in that hellhole called Omega, he had gotten as dirty as the place, breaking the same rules he had made when he had first begun. They were mercs, just only mercs, but even then, there were rules you didn't break, never forgot, because that was what set him aside from the gangs and the criminal scum that ran the station. It wasn't what the innocents of Omega who named him had hoped for, wasn't what he had stood for when he had begun cleaning up Omega, one armour piercing slug at a time. Archangel was an executor of pure justice, punishing the wicked and protecting the weak. What he had ended up doing was anything but pure, any protection the weak could derive from him a side effect of his personal crusade.

It wasn't a name he would have chosen for himself. A turian as a mythological agent of justice, working for one of the human's major gods? That was a burden and a responsibility he wasn't sure he could take on. It wasn't one he was sure he even wanted. Sidonis's betrayal had shown how badly the name fit to the likes of him. In the end, he was just a turian with a gun and a sense of justice that saw no sense in the endless bureaucracy and red tape protecting the criminals and punishing the victims. He didn't think those two years had changed him much, he had no qualms about killing the criminals and mercs of Omega, knowing that every one he brought down was one less to carry out the smuggling operations, the shake downs and the murders that they took as a matter of course, but he'd believed in the people who thought the same way, just as he had when he took up the chase for Saren. And look where that had gotten him. Archangel was dead on Omega as far as he was concerned, a mythical divine protector that couldn't even protect his own team didn't deserve that title.

Waking up in the Normandy, the SR-2 he corrected himself, had been a shock, and he'd been half convinced that he was either dead or the last two years was a dream, ending only after he had been hit by a volley of Tarak's rockets. It had taken Chakwas, another ghost from the Normandy, a good half hour to settle him down after he had woken up, explaining quite pointedly that he was neither dead nor was he just waking up from a nightmare. Instead, he was very much alive, if only thanks to the non-stop efforts of the doctor and the cutting edge surgical equipment the sick bay had been outfitted with. Getting hit by a rocket with enough punch to slag an assault mech, he was lucky to only have a partial loss of hearing in one diaphragm and a face barely holding together thanks to the bone strengthening implants and surgical bonding pads Chakwas has grafted onto him. Even his armour was fully functional, the only damage from the rocket's armour piercing plasma jet being a light charring and a broken section of his collar guard. He didn't have a mirror, but he didn't really need it when his raw nerves were telling him just how bad. He didn't mind, not much. A few inches to the right or down, and it would have gone right through his vitals. He was lucky to be alive, and he knew it.

Even if he was on a Cerberus ship. Just thinking about the name was enough to recall the first time he had heard of the shadow organization from Shepard after a planetary foray in years gone past.

"You won't want to know what they were doing down there Garrus, but you're going to have to read the reports either way. Stopping Saren's insane goal is still our priority, but what I saw there takes the number two slot. Turning colonists into Geth husks, weaponized Rachi hive troops testing on colonies, if Cerberus isn't stopped, we might put an end to Saren just in time for them to unleash their own horrors. Wherever we find them Garrus, we wreck them, and we do it hard."

It was a sentiment he instantly agreed with after reading the reports, more so after a later encounter with a Cerberus research facilities; the things he saw would have turned a krogan's stomach. Cerberus was bad news, and dealing with them at gunpoint made the best sense. Of course, that had made things a little awkward. The ghost of the ship he'd served on, now bearing the face paint of an enemy that claimed to place humanity first, but sacrificed them without thought. Joker and Chakwas, crew he'd respected on the original Normandy and gotten along with as people who shared a common goal, now wearing the colours of that same enemy. It didn't matter that the victims were mostly human, justice didn't care what planet you evolved on, and everything he'd seen about Cerberus screamed for them to be taken down hard. That anyone on the Normandy would be working for them now had seemed like a betrayal of that standard he held. The doctor hadn't tried to justify her choices or make excuses, and he wasn't certain if he was willing to listen, she simply said six words that rooted him to the spot.

"I serve Commander Shepard, not Cerberus."

And that was that.

Shepard had died, Garrus watched the man's suit telemetry go dead from inside the escape pod as the Normandy broke up in deep space. But the human doctor had told him not ten minutes ago in no-nonsense tones just where her allegiances lay, and it wasn't with a dead hero. Shepard was alive, and the last few minutes he remembered before getting hit by Tarak's gunship wasn't a stimulant induced hallucination. The man was alive, just not all of him, and only by the graces of Cerberus advanced medical and cybernetics technology, Chakwas had been clear on that. Garrus had been flabbergasted. Never mind the technologies involved that would shake the galaxy were it publicly known about, the fact that they had done something like this to the man had left him speechless. Logically, he understood the reasons well enough, but the sense of wrongness just wouldn't go away. And was he really the same person and not some clever facsimile?

The doctor believed it really was him. Maybe she even had proof. But the Shepard he remembered would never have worked with Cerberus. But the Shepard he remembered wasn't more machine than human. It was impossible not to draw an uneasy similarity between him and what Saren had become after his implantations. The short explanation from Chakwas gave him a basic idea, but there was so much more that he didn't know. What could justify ever working for an organization as heinous as this? He needed answers, but didn't know what questions to ask. Eventually, he squared his shoulders and stabbed the appropriate button with his talons. He didn't know what to ask, but he certainly wouldn't get any answers if he didn't make the attempt at least. Besides, Shepard or not, he at least owed a favour for pulling his sorry scales out of Omega.

The first thing he saw when the doors to the cargo bay opened was a Mantis gunship hanging from the arms of a gantry. Garrus felt his mandibles flare involuntarily at the sight, and he stood rooted to the spot. Not just any Mantis gunship, but one with the stylized sun and halo of the Blue Suns insignia emblazoned on its nose turret. A handful of the SR-2's crew were swarming over the craft, replacing damaged hull plates and refitting weapon modules, but it was mostly intact, it's menacing profile still sleek and deadly despite the presence of the crew peering at it's innards. The last time he had seen that gunship, Tarak had been at it's controls, angrily trying, and succeeding, at wiping him out with a volley of rockets. Even with half it's mechanical guts on display, the predatory arch to its wings or the gleaming twin autocannon nestled just under it's nose radiated a kind of malice. _I can still end you_, it seemed to say. Before he could formulate the question, a gravelly human voice interrupted his train of thought.

"So you're Archangel eh?" Garrus turned his head slightly to see a grizzled human leaning back against the wall a few meters away, the dirty yellow heavy combat armour he wore instantly marking him apart from the rest of the Cerberus crew he'd seen in his brief trip from the sickbay to here. Something tickled on the edges of his memory about the human's face, but he couldn't quite put his claw on it. Puffing out a wispy cloud of smoke from the cigar in his mouth, the man fixed Garrus with a glass eye peering out from his scarred face. "Heard about you back on Omega, never did get your face or name though. Didn't figure you'd be a turian. You scaly bastards aren't big on hit and run the way you were on Omega." He shrugged as if to say it wasn't important. "So why are you here?"

"What?"

"If you're Archangel, you're not in it for the credits, and you sure as hell aren't here for the atmosphere. We're still in Omega, the airlock's the other way, and you should know by now that this isn't a bloody pleasure cruise. Either you're here to cause trouble, or you're here to set terms with the boss of the ship. You're not stupid enough to not know what's going on, Garrus." The human waved a hand vaguely in the air at Garrus's sudden alertness. "I've done my homework. Most humans have trouble telling one turian apart from the other, but I'm not most humans. Garrus Valkarian, big bloody hero along with the rest the crew who took down Saren. Could have made it big if you wanted to, except you dropped off the grid to show up on Omega taking potshots at mercs. Damned stupid choice if you ask me. Anyway, squawkers says you're the kind of turian who gets his scaly ass in a twist over sods getting their toes stepped on so smart money says that's what you came here to find out if you should. Especially seeing how this this is a Cerberus ship."

"I'm not a mercenary like you are Zaeed. I've got my own reasons to take down Cerberus, but I'm not going to go off half cocked." He began stiffly, crossing his arms and definitely not liking the tone the human was taking with him, confident that he knew where he had known the face from. Zaeed Massani, a mercenary with a reputation for getting the job done for enough credits, and wanted by the Turian Hierarchy for hijacking and bringing down the Verrikan. The matter had been considered closed years later, and the case buried, but Garrus never forgot a face he saw in the Most Wanted List. A few years ago, that would have been enough for him to put a bullet in between the man's ears. He had friends on the Verrikan. But this was neither the time nor place to start a fight. With some effort, he bit down his anger and continued evenly. "I came here to get answers from Shepard."

"Like what? Whether it's really him? Loyalty to dead people is a bloody stupid thing to throw down with in my book, but hell if I care. I don't give a varren's arse what you think is worth the price of your bullets. Look, I'll do you a favour by telling you this much, if you're looking for Shepard, goddamn hero of the Citadel, that isn't him." He gestured with a thumb at the gunship where the maintenance crew were reattaching an engine cowling. Below, a grey painted YMIR mech stood guard, back to Garrus as it's sensor pod remained trained on the gunship.

"You mean an artificial intelligence?"

"No, I mean it's actually a goddamn monkey." Zaeed puffed in annoyance on his cigar. "It's no secret on this ship that there's a brain in that freak show mech, but there's no telling who's brain it is. If that scrap heap really is a dead man come back to life, then I'm a bleeding leprechaun. I don't care who or what it is so long as it signs my paycheck, but if you're looking for that particular Shepard, do everyone a favour and get off this ship before we start having to talk with our guns." With that, Zaeed dropped the stub of the cigar to the floor, grinding out the smouldering end with his boot heel and stalked off. "Goddamn weirdest employer I ever had, never thought I'd see the day when I'd be working for a mech."

Garrus didn't bother tracking Zaeed's departure. Whatever was chewing at the human wasn't his business, and he didn't care to make it his. What would a mercenary know about Shepard? But he had trouble discarding the doubts the mercenary had voiced so easily. What if it really wasn't him? There was no telling what Cerberus could pull up out of Shepard's history.

"I SEE YOU HAVE MET ZAEED"

The former C-Sec agent turned, finding himself nearly face to face with the glowing red optics of the YMIR mech, biting off a swear at how quietly it had snuck up on him. No, not it, Garrus corrected himself, as the assault mech came to a barely audible stop. Shepard.

"IT IS GOOD TO SEE THAT YOU HAVE RECOVERED GARRUS."

It had been so much easier to dismiss it as a bad joke back on Omega, hyped on combat stimulants and wary of the strange mech that proclaimed itself to be the commander Shepard. There was nothing he could look at and find the familiar profile of the man he had known. Even the voice held no trace of the human who had helped him put his ghosts behind him. Rather than confront the issue, he fell back on the opening he had been given, relaxing slightly as he looked the mech in the sensor pod. "Well enough for being hit by a rocket. How bad does it look? No one would give me a mirror."

Optics flickered briefly and the mech cocked it's sensor pod in a very human fashion. After a pause, it spread it's weapon arms widely, flat digitized voice booming in response.

"NOT BAD. COULD BE WORSE"

Looking at the glowing red optics of the YMIR assault mech standing in front of him, Garrus decided that he had a very good point. He shook his head with a strained chuckle. This wasn't how he had wanted things to go. There were still questions to be asked, answers, hard answers, he needed to learn. He cast an eye further down the cargo bay, where most of the maintenance crew were still swarming over the gunship in their repair efforts, and caught a few furtive looks being sent in their direction. "Look... Shepard, I-" he was cut off before he could continue when an autocannon arm waved his objections over.

"YOU ARE STILL NOT CERTAIN" he began without preamble, optics glinting in the light as they refocused on Garrus.

"It's still hard to believe," he admitted, darting another look at the crew working on the gunship. Most were still busy with their work, but more than a few turned their heads to follow their discussion. A not quite suppressed yipe of pain soon preceded a plate fitting being locked into position on top of a distracted technician's thumb. "Look, maybe this can wait for a while, Chakwas filled me in on why you're here, bits of it anyway." He lowered his voice, pointless on a Cerberus ship likely to be filled with listening devices, but he he wasn't about to change the habit now. "I've heard the stories even out here in Omega, Freedom's Progress, Fielder's Folly, Salient Hope, it looks really bad I know. The Shepard I know wouldn't hesitate to do whatever it takes to put a stop to it, Collectors or no Collectors. The doctor said that you came looking for me, so I can guess the reason but... Cerberus? They've done a lot of things that make my plates itch, even if this is the right thing to do, I don't know if I can trust them after all this. Shepard, I can trust, but... is there any way to prove it?"

Shepard drew back with a hiss of servos, and a pair of outsized mechanical shoulders gyrated in what Garrus could only guess was an attempt at a shrug. Garrus couldn't really find fault at the lack of a response, Zaeed's words coming back to haunt him. There was little question as to the general mechanics explaining how a mech could be a living person, cybernetics made the question child's play, but how could he even prove his identity to himself? Crack open the case to sample brain DNA? The silence went on for almost too long before he replied. The flat electronic tones of the voice made it impossible to infer any kind of emotional inflection, but if he didn't know better, he would have said it carried a lot of weariness.

"I MET TALI ON FREEDOM'S PROGRESS. SHE ASKED ME THE SAME QUESTION."

"You met Tali? She's here?" That would have been a pleasant surprise if it was the case. Quarian expressions were impossible to read, given their tendency to prefer nearly opaque one way visors rather than translucent for their environmental suits, but he thought the the gifted young woman on her ritual Pilgrimage had respected Shepard a great deal. Her presence aboard would answer a lot of his questions and put him at ease. To his disappointment, the sensor pod waved from side to side in the analogue of a shaken head.

"NO. SHE HAS HER OWN COMMAND. A MISSION FOR THE MIGRANT FLEET"

"Her own mission? That's... unexpected." He supposed he shouldn't have been. You didn't a direct role in the destruction of a Reaper threatening the Citadel without earning a reputation, no matter how hard the higher ups tried to bury it. The Council had plenty of rules and red tape barriers to hide the ugly truths they didn't want to see or confront, sheltered in the Presidium's opulence. He'd been shunted aside as soon as it was polite once they learned that he wouldn't toe their line. The Quarians didn't have that luxury, so Tali's added duties made sense. "Was she convinced?"

"YES." The sensor lamp flickered out, but lit up a heartbeat later. "WE CANNOT PREDICT HOW OTHERS WILL ACT. BUT WE CAN CONTROL OUR ACTIONS. SALEON IS A GHOST. THE HEART DOCTOR IS DEAD. TALI THINKS IT DID NOT HAPPEN SOON ENOUGH."

Garrus shook his head at the puzzled frowns of the closer eavesdroppers. It wouldn't have made sense to them anyway, or anyone else but the three people who had stormed that horror filled medical frigate to corner the elusive Doctor Heart and put an end to his grisly business. He wasn't fully convinced, didn't know if he could be with the way things were, but it was tempting to take things as they seemed. "I suppose that will have to do for now, Shepard." He let out a strained chuckle. "Can't really afford to doubt ourselves when the universe needs saving again can we? Anyway," he began with a claw pointed at the gunship, clumsily changing the topic, "how did you get your hands on that? Last thing I remember, Tarak was sitting in it, and he really didn't seem like the giving sort."

Servos whirring, the optics shifted focus to the suspended craft before flicking back to him.

"JUMPED ABOARD. THEN SHOT HIM."

"Jumped aboard?" Garrus was taken aback momentarily, but then it dawned on him and he snorted. "Ohh, very funny Shepard, you're just making fun of poor old Garrus aren't you? Did you stay for the ride too?"

Shepard only shrugged at his question with a hiss of mechanical shoulders locking into place. "NO AND YES. HAD HELP ON TAKEOFF. BIOTICS. LANDING AND RECOVERY" He paused, optics shifting multiple times as they focused and refocused, though on what Garrus had no idea. "LESS THAN OPTIMAL. BUT GUNSHIP STILL SERVICEABLE"

He only shook his head at that, sensing a longer story to it, but not really wanting to hear it now. He took another look at the lean predatory figure of the craft. One of the crew was burnishing the nose armour, wiping out the Blue Suns insignia on it, but he could still imagine Tarak at it's controls while it's nose turret twinkled with rapid fire death. It was going to be a long time before that memory dulled, longer even if Shepard intended to make regular use of his latest battle salvage.

"WHY OMEGA GARRUS. YOU SAID YOU INTENDED TO GO BACK TO C-SEC. DO THINGS RIGHT"

Shepard's question broke him out of his reverie, and he found himself turning back to meet those unnerving red optics again with clenched mandibles. "I did go back to C-Sec Shepard, it just didn't last. After you were gone, C-Sec was more than happy to take me in, and just about anyone else who could hold a gun and follow orders. What they really needed though, were people who knew how the system worked and didn't need to be trained before taking on the uniform. It seemed like a good chance to make good what you taught me. It didn't make a difference. Politics and red tape stopped us from doing our jobs properly, pretty much the way they used to in the old days. A lot of the big time criminals didn't survive Saren's attack, but the new ones were twice as bad and they had a lot of political backing. Red sand dealers, smugglers, even an organ thief once, we couldn't touch them Shepard, not one talon." Heat began to enter his voice as he recounted his experiences, remembering the frustrations of watching the scavengers and scum prey on the innocent while the worst they could do was 'invite' them in for five minutes of touch talk that went nowhere before their lawyers showed up. But what he didn't talk about was rumours that had started floating around in the Citadel.

Shepard was a hero, but he couldn't really have been right about sentient starships waiting in dark space to sterilize the galaxy, that had been the first rumour, the first sign of when things were going to go bad. No, he told himself, the first sign he had acknowledged. The cover ups, the manufactured stories that downplayed the warnings of Reapers, he had tried to rationalized those far too easily. They couldn't afford to panic all of Council space with the nightmare that the Reapers represented, they needed time to build up their forces, work together while the universe kept on limping along. He'd kept quiet hoping that it was true, but as time went on, the rumours became more vicious, and he could see where the sunspots were flaring. People started to talk about Shepard's mental instabilities, how his service record on Torfan and Akuze, dragged out in all it's bloody detail by some nosy scandal seeking reporter, began to be used as proof that he was finally losing it, and it wasn't just among the conspiracy theorists either. When Executor Pallin had started mouthing those same words to some political flunky, it had taken nearly all his discipline to keep from breaking the turian's lying mandibles and feeding them back to him. He'd resigned the next day.

"I came to Omega because it was free from Citadel politics Shepard. No rules, no red tape, but no laws to protect the innocent either. Omega was where I could really make a difference Shepard, and I did. The mercs, the criminals and the gangs, there was no shortage of them. They were easy to find, all I had to do was pull the trigger. The people called me Archangel because they thought I could help them, put an end to the gangs that terrorise the station with their turf wars, murders and shakedowns. I even had a team later on, people who'd grown tired of watching criminals get away with red tape and politics. I showed them that anyone could make a difference if they tried to do the right thing, I gave them hope Shepard!" Abruptly, he deflated, remembering just what had happened to that team. "And then I got them killed. Shows what I know. What about you Shepard? Two years gone, not a hint that you're even alive, and now this." He waved a claw at the bone white armoured chest plate. "Who did this to you? And why?"

"PRICE FOR COMING BACK. CERBERUS TRANSPLANT NECESSARY. NOT MY PREFERENCE BUT WOULD BE DEAD OTHERWISE" Shepard raised an autocannon to his optics, letting the gun sheathes snap open and close a few times before turning the optics back to him. When he continued, it was with a whine of servos settling his oversized shoulders lower. There was a long moment as he considered Garrus before Shepard put in the last shot. "IRREVERSIBLE"

"There's really no way back?" He had to hand it to the commander for taking it so, well, easily. He wasn't averse to cybernetics the way some genetic purists were, his face was being held together by some for that matter. But to lose your whole body, he didn't know if he could take that kind of trauma and still be sane. Or for that matter, whether Shepard would stay that way. Sensory deprivation drove just about any sentient species insane, and that mech looked short on everything but optics and audio. How long did he have in that shell before it got to him? He didn't want to think on it.

"NOT MUCH TO RETURN TO"

Those five words conjured a lot of questions out of nothing, and a sick feeling in the pit of his craw. It was easy to assume that Cerberus was responsible for all of this with their twisted schemes, butchering the man and burying what was left inside a mech body to do their dirty work. A twisted payback for all the times he'd gotten in their way and burned their bases to the ground, the final sick joke being that he'd work for them now as an object. Too easy to let that growing rage get the better of him and start gunning down Cerberus. Garrus shook his head, angry at the way he was thinking, but unable to dismiss it fully. Even like this, the commander wouldn't be so easily bent to something like Cerberus, not of his own will. "I owe you a lot Shepard," he began, "heck, even without that, saving the colonists, it's the right thing to do. But Shepard... Cerberus? You know-" He paused, looking at the mech frame in a new light. "You need them don't you?"

The sensor pod slowly bobbed in acknowledgement. "LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS TOO SPECIALIZED. NOT AVAILABLE ELSEWHERE IN THE GALAXY. THIS IS THE BEST CHOICE FOR NOW"

"I AM ALREADY IN HELL GARRUS. I NEED PEOPLE I CAN TRUST TO WATCH MY BACK. IF THE TIME COMES" The optics of the sensor pod were already focused on him, but there was something in the way they the whirred that left him unsettled. Was the commander thinking the same thing he was? There was a suggestion of movement in one of the weapon arms, and a snap of it's gun sheaths. "I NEED YOU TO DO WHAT IS RIGHT"

Garrus looked at Shepard, mandibles flaring in surprise. The human concept of hell had many meanings, but in this case, he could guess what Shepard was talking about. Yes, he was thinking the same thing, and asking him to be the insurance against that eventuality. Thinking about what it meant made his plates crawl, but that was enough to convince him. He stuck out a gloved claw before sheepishly realizing there wasn't really any hand to shake with. The commander had stuck out his arm as well, gun sheaths open in what he thought was an analogue to an open hand, except it had no fingers and was big enough to swallow Garrus's entire arm. He chuckled, and both parties withdrew their respective arms. "Well if you're already in hell Shepard, I guess you'll have to make some room for me. It's not like I wasn't planning on visiting sometime. Count me in commander, and I'll have your back."

"IT IS GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK GARRUS" He paused for a moment, optics flickering again. "I FORGOT TO ASK" A weapon arm swung away, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the gunship.

"CAN YOU FLY"

* * *

_Four Days Ago_

Omega was an interesting place. Very challenging. Biotechnological plague, gunshot wounds, industrial accidents, occasional element zero poisoning, limited resources, attempted extortion from Blue Suns and vorcha. He enjoyed the work, stretched his skills to the limit to maintain the clinic. Similar conditions not likely to be found elsewhere. Thousands of alien species concentrated in a cramped station, lack of government imposed order, result was obvious. Anarchic breakdown inevitable. Many Asari generations ago of course, Omega's structural integrity insufficient to withstand thousands of years of anarchic warfare. Anarchy soon replaced by factional strife as new armed groups form under charismatic or capable individuals. Violence did not stop of course, only became more organized. Many secrets in Omega, much drama. Chaotic, disgusting, heartless of course, yet never a dull moment.

"Doctor." It was his chief of security, a human female. "You're certain they'll be able to bring the environmental plant back online in time? Isn't there something we can do?"

"No, no. Clinic security still an issue, patients require further observation and treatment. Vorcha and Blue Suns presence diminished, but still active. Dividing security to deal with environment systems unacceptable risk. Complicates our work." Mordin replied immediately, sheathing his bulbous eyes with a flick of membrane tissue. "Volunteer group sufficient for the task. Well armed, should be interesting to observe results of their work."

The security chief nodded, leaving to fulfil her duties. Mordin smiled and turned back to his work, running the spectrophotometric scanners on the latest tissue samples. Localised plague cure was working, but needed to check for complications. She was concerned of course, impossible to hide state of environmental systems from patient or clinic staff. Status alerts everywhere. Knew that district had limited time until atmospheric concentrations became dangerously toxic from Omega's industrial runoff. If plague did not kill district inhabitants, contamination would. Hm. May consider self regulating atmospheric purifier for possible upgrades to existing systems. Maybe later. Security and medical matters more important now, and chief would do a good job.

Good person, like most of the volunteers who came to the clinic. Not all knowledgeable in medical treatment of course, but all willing to provide help however possible, humans in particular. Not unusual. That plague was engineered obvious. Rate of transmission, lethality rates and cross species infection not sustainable, evolutionary dead end. Natural virus highly specific, difficult to cross biosphere distinct evolution so quickly. Vorcha immune, but scavengers, not scientifically adept. Humans only technologically capable species unaffected by virus, blame for plague not illogical, clinic was sanctuary against reprisals. Not true that humans caused plague. True, humans not infected. True, humans looting the dead. Simplistic motive, but incorrect. Unusual genetic markers within virus hidden inside junk code, not common in galactic pathogens, but seen before in STG databanks on specific tech retrieved in the field. Suspected Collector involvement. Volunteer soldiers from Cerberus confirmed suspicions.

Had motives of course. Cerberus not charitable organization. Requested his assistance on arrival. Very unusual. Strong anti-alien policies well noted from time in STG, but now asking assistance from Salarian. Why? Not policy shift, leading soldier claimed. Had heard about the missing colonies of course, but did not know cause at the time. Collector involvement requires resources beyond Cerberus to defeat. Investigation into Collector methods needed, asked his expertise in determining their methodology. An interesting challenge. Agreed of course, his services for theirs in reactivating Gozu district environmental controls. Time on Omega was beneficial, helping people, heal the sick, sometimes kill dangerous individuals, but not a long term position. Also, could not stand the mechs. Necessary, but too noisy, distracting. Cerberus analogue was special exception.

Cerberus squad leader unusual, fascinating. Did not expect to see functional human nervous system implanted in conventional mech chassis. Cerberus activities noted from STG work, projects conducted, experiments in biotics, xenobiology and genetic engineering. Unethical, but highly advanced. Cerberus cybernetics research not as sophisticated. Would have to check with old STG contacts, examine if new developments with Cerberus cybernetics research occured. Commercial and military cybernetics technology well developed of course. Quarian implants and prosthetics commonplace in galactic economy before turian, salarian and human developments, especially in military branches. But complete nervous system transfer to artificial frames not built to mimic host species biology unheard of, too many risks. Physical and psychological trauma determined to exceed organic tolerance levels upon cryogenic revival post transplant. Data input overwhelming to biological brains. Total nervous system shutdown most likely result. Projected survival rate less than 0.03%. Hm. Collectors came first, but would have to examine organic/machine interface at first opportunity. Human adaptability and nervous system structure different from Salarian of course, but worth studying.

Still, Cerberus squad leader coherent and sane, very different from original estimates on viable complete cybernetic transplants. Methods used presented a puzzle. Fascinating. Could not be based off existing cybernetics technology, too simple, damaging to psyche. Unless not fully sane. Perhaps mixture of epicatechin or serotonin re-uptake inhibitors to prevent long term psychological decay. Patient digestive system not transferred with nervous system. Direct nutrient infusion and injection of inhibitors into monoamine oxidases bypass conflicts with possible tyramine consumption. Still, risky, could kill patient. Cause irreversible neurotransmitter damage. Dangerous when combined with assault mech frame. Would have to ask later. Also would have to determine motive.

Why conduct research into total cybernetic transplant? Significant resources required to artificially maintain nervous system without organic components. If combat performance required, direct implantation unnecessary, virtual controls sufficient. Time lag acceptable trade for adaptability. Wider range of functions, no risk to operator. Implantation method permanently trapped subject inside machine frame, would cause psychological damage to transfer between bodies. Would create even more limitations. Hm. Not a weapon then, not cost effective. Perhaps prosthetic body? Yes, yes. If organic body damaged beyond repair, implantation sensible, preserve nervous system, preserve identity. Organic limitations surpassed by artificial transference. An answer perhaps. But only partial. Opens more puzzles. Squad leader identity unknown, but working for Cerberus. Cerberus conducts experiments to ensure human galactic dominance. Machine/organic advancement goal unlikely. Loss of species identity from trans-organic evolution conflicts with Cerberus long term goals of genetic superiority. Still, worth consideration if Cerberus goals have expanded. May become threat to galactic stability if transplant technology becomes widespread. Will have to flag case for STG teams to step up surveillance.

Preservation? If individual of sufficient importance, cybernetic transplantation from failing organic body logical. If cost of transplant significant, patient equally significant. Still, placement into combat body and command of front line operations illogical for high value persons. Unless individual originally combat specialist. Who? More puzzles. Limited speech indicative of early stage text parser, not patient limitations. Probability indicative of transfer and installation process still in experimental or prototype stage. Process and recipient body not optimised for normal range functionality. Experimental subject? Volunteer? No, no. Would not be given command of squad if patient a volunteer for testing purposes. Preservation of individual most likely conclusion. Subject of significant value to Cerberus, but also combat trained. Obviously human. Important objective, perhaps related to Collectors? Yes. Logical to transplant subject if skill sets match requirements for high level objective. Limited pool of humans to meet criteria. Had a few ideas on identity. Some quite interesting.

Mordin looked up suddenly. The hubbub of patient and clinic chatter had spiked in volume and excitement, quite audible from his open laboratory door. Mordin blinked once as the door to the foyer hissed open..

"Daniel. Good to see you have returned." His formerly missing assistant was paler for his species, more than before had left the clinic. Mordin looked at the human with a critical eye, analytical mind cataloguing the injuries. "Minor bruising, contusion on left eye. Warned of risk. Gozu district not safe. Still, good to see that you are mostly unharmed. Trust recovery team found you?"

"You sent them?" His assistant smiled wanly at the affirmative nod, sitting heavily the only chair in the laboratory. "Somebody had to do it doctor. I didn't study medicine so I could leave people behind to die when I could have done something. I found the survivors, a group of batarians in vorcha territory."

Mordin harrumphed. Daniel was a bright young man. Not a Salarian, mind you, but still did not hesitate to provide assistance. Good to see, but idealistic. Made him take unnecessary risks. "Unlikely that you were welcomed. Significant percentage of Gozu population consider humans responsible for plague. Staying at clinic lower risk, controlled environment, patient inflow constant. Cannot help most outside. Here, all can be helped"

Daniel's head snapped up, a frown on his face. "I had to try it doctor! We're supposed to help everyone..." The frown faded, and his head dipped down in a human gesture Mordin recognized as defeat. "But... you're right. They didn't believe I was there to help them. They thought the vaccine solutions were plague containers, claimed I was there to spread the disease even further. They didn't do very much to me, but they were talking about cutting off my fingers when they showed up."

Differential emotional inflections to Daniel's voice gave indication who he was referring to, but not directly. Mordin had no trouble understanding, but disliked the practice in communication, possibility of miscommunication were frequently abused. His assistant continued.

"They came in and shot them, just like that." A shudder ran through the human as he closed his eyes at the words, opening them again only to give Mordin a questioning look. "And then... the mech spoke, asked me questions and told me you had sent it and the others. They were taking orders from the machine, doctor, like it had an actual intelligence, not a VI. It must have been an artificial intelligence, but how is such a thing possible and where did it come from? Was it, was it something you've had all this while?"

"Not true," Mordin snorted at the thought. AI research work limited by Council convention, scarce opportunity for discovery. The salarian ran his fingers across the spectrophotometric data that was just starting to come online, computing the spread of the Collector plague to his re-engineering efforts. "Not AI. Actually human nervous system and cerebral structure transferred to modified cybernetic interface. Fascinating tech, would like opportunity to study at future date. Could have many applications. Still, outcome of his task not yet certain. Environmental systems not yet reactivated with plague cure. Have contingency plans, but suspect will not be necessary. Vorcha well armed and aggressive yes, but lack tactical-" he stopped, distracted by a chirp from his omni-tool. Holographic display panels blinked into being, but Mordin didn't need the reams of data they were displaying to know what had happened. The red emergency lights of the district environmental warning systems flickered, the lab returning to it's normal lighting as the clinic hummed with the sound of extractor fans hard at work. The salarian nodded pleasantly.

"Hm. Results earlier than original estimations. Still, environmental systems now restored, airborne vaccine now being distributed. Should soon see reduction in plague cases. For now, patients still require medical attention." He tapped a finger at a spike on the data, indicating an unexpected mutation in the virus. Collector virus interesting, genetic hijacking systems significantly advanced, but not even Collector tech could completely halt evolution deviating from design goals. Would like to preserve sample, observe evolutionary path. No no no. Too risky. Virus eradication paramount "New vaccines should have no problems, but noted increase in non-response to Triclopan among early batarian patients, virus adapting to older vaccines. May lose lethality in process, but risk too high to ignore. Apply Tenzopane with anti-histamines and monitor."

Daniel nodded, wearily rising to his feet before rushing off to fulfill his instructions. Mordin smiled. Good human, still in shock, but work would provide time to emotionally process recent experiences, allow psychological adaptation. Minimal immediate stress. Still could relapse, but best option. With a nod of his own, he turned back to his work, analysing the virus samples he had collected. His understanding of the virus was already complete, but he fast tracking mutations was a never ending, if simple, task. It did not fully occupy his mind, as parts of it drifted back to the unusual Cerberus squad leader and the mission it had for him. Negating Collector tech would be interesting challenge. Would need samples and data of course, but suspected they already possessed some. A good challenge.

* * *

_Presently_

Acturus station was no Citadel, a comparison she never failed to make every time she boarded the former. Make no mistake, it was one of the most advanced stations ever fielded by humanity, combining the best technology and design principles to build the space borne capital of the Systems Alliance. It was huge, a doughnut five kilometres in diameter that was home to tens of thousands of people and an entire fleet with room to spare for more. Compared to the Citadel with it's flowing white walls and kilometres long starfish arms, Acturus was a small toy with ugly bulkheads and narrow corridors. But it was a human station, one that she could take pride in as a ground pounder of the Systems Alliance. Former ground pounder, she corrected her thoughts. It'd been more than a good part of two years now, but Operations Chief Ashley Williams didn't stick in her head the way Gunnery Chief did. No surprise there, the biggest part of her career had been when she'd been that Gunnery Chief and earned all the medals in her locker now. Grandpa Williams, bless his soul, he would have been proud to see her redeem the William's name in the Alliance.

Not that she normally wore them. You don't wear medals out in the field unless you want to make yourself a target, just a pair of pips on your shoulder to set you apart from your squad, the metal dulled less they catch a sniper's eye. Two years in, and the armour never really did seem to come off. Without it, walking down the halls of one of the secured wings of Acturus station, she felt vulnerable and helpless in the dress blues she had on, the medals she now wore marking her a target for a different sort of sniping. Exemplary Service Awards and the Star of Terra drew a lot of looks, and not always friendly. Even the sidearm she had strapped to her thigh didn't seem to help much, you didn't shoot Alliance members just because they made snide remarks behind your back.

It was just one of the reasons why she didn't like coming to Acturus station. But you didn't ignore a summons from an Alliance admiral, and especially not when there was more than one admiral on the horn demanding your presence. That old Williams demon was niggling in the back of her head, gnawing away with doubt about something that had gone wrong for her to attract so much attention from the brass. She gave it a good whack with the brief she had received seven hours earlier and let the doubt demon go back to it's corner. She was a damned good Alliance Marine and she knew it. Colonist abductions were getting into the alarming numbers, and nobody had a clue they were willing to share, yet. The summons were supposed to be part of a cross service exchange between fleet, marine and COINTEL ops that she was going to participate in. What they were expecting out of her, she didn't know. Chasing batarian slavers and renegade turian pirates didn't leave her with a lot more information on the matter than what the extranet had. What she could guess though, was that they were going to want ground team, well armed and expecting trouble, her kind of work.

She hoped that Requisitions would be less of a tightwad when it came to doling out the good stuff this time round. Resorting to using enemy weapons was perfectly fine in her book when you were behind enemy lines or low on ammunition. But when she and her team had to rely on it as a regular source of kit for their forward operations, that was stretching things a little. Every time she put a request in with the quartermasters, it was like engaging in tug of war with a dreadnought. Whenever she put in port at a naval base anyway. Alliance brass never said it aloud, but she could tell that they were keeping her as far away from anyone with stripes on their shoulders as they could manage. She'd beat the Williams curse with grit and sheer dumb luck, but got saddled with a new curse at the same time, the same one that hit just about everybody on the Normandy when it blew up. Reapers were a myth, never mind the giant squid ship that ground half the Citadel fleet to dust, and anyone who believed it was best kept far, far away from everyone else.

For her part, she was just glad to be away from all that political backstabbing. It gave her time to come to grips with everything she'd lost that day, and put a lot of distance between her and those corporate execs using Shepard's name or face and not quite right composite voice to pitch body armour, guns, loans or hah, life insurance. And hers was a lucky case. Everybody got separated but out of all the survivors, she was the only one still on active front line service. Everybody else got reassigned to make work positions managing supply dumps or backwater planets or just quietly handed their walking papers. Anybody who talked about their time chasing Saren and the 'Reapers' meant instant discharge and an official silencing on pain of a few decades in the clink. She was an Alliance Marine through and through, but sometimes it was hard to remember just where she should be pointing her gun at.

Not today though, she wouldn't be pointing it anyone. Bracing herself for the meeting, she walked through the cold bulkheads of the Acturus station, passing through the numerous security checkpoints in the upper levels. The scanners she could understand, but some of the questions were just plain crazy. Yes, she was Ashley Williams, no, she wasn't a batarian spy or geth infiltrator, no four eyes nor flashlight head, see? It would have been a laughing matter, but the people in the dimmed meeting room waiting for her were anything but amused.

For a low-profile affair, there were a lot of shiny chests in sitting around the table with the multiple high resolution holo-display. Some of the gathered men had familiar heads, but others she didn't recognize. Hatchet faced Admiral Hackett was easy to pick out, as was Commodore Silas of the Alliance Periphery Control whom she'd bumped heads with a few times before over jurisdiction issues, but she didn't recognize the spook with the Systems Alliance Intelligence Command badge. That one gave her a hard look when she entered, and she got that nervous itch between her shoulders that put her on her guard. SAICOM didn't exactly have a good reputation among the marine branches. Others began to filter into the room, Captain Hashan and Tenma from the Terminus patrol fleets, another SAICOM spook who she also didn't recognize, and most surprisingly, lieutenant Barker, Councillor Anderson's personal aide.

The meeting began almost immediately after Barker showed up, discussing the situation with the colonies pretty much as she had suspected with some of the usual ass covering. What she hadn't expected was how bad the news was, scrubbed free of the usual extranet bullshit. Pirates and slavers were sadistic sons of bitches, and their attacks were always noisy, bloody messes that left a lot of smoking ruins and dead bodies behind. These attacks didn't leave a mark on the colonies, just intact buildings without a sign of battle or evacuation and not a single human left alive or dead. Even the ships in port were left untouched, some of them in their final stages of takeoff. Reading some of the reports on half eaten meals sitting undisturbed made her hair stand on end. It was as if the people were there one minute, and gone the next. If there was ever a Rapture gone bad, this was it.

She half listened to the brass trading theories and ideas along with the usual accusations, but she didn't really pay attention to them. Oddly, the SAICOM spooks were just sitting there. Just looking at the spotty intelligence here, she had a few ideas of her own, but it was going to be a cold day in hell before any one of them bought the idea of what she had seen capable of doing something like this. If anyone had the kind of tech to do something like this, it was them, but Reapers were a myth, the official line went, and that was that. She wasn't going to go down that road anymore. Across the room, she spotted the same kind of frustration playing across Hackett's face, obviously not happy about the state of things.

It was two minutes later when the higher ranked SAICOM officer produced a datapad and spoke up. "I think I can shed some light on this case gentlemen. We've only just finished our latest analysis from the data mining on Freedom's Progress, and while it doesn't answer very much, it does have a few more clues in it than the previous colony attacks." He paused for effect while the others digested the information. "I trust that we are all familiar with the rogue organization known as Cerberus as well as the Quarians?"

"Out with it Osbourne," Hackett growled, "Are you saying you've got evidence that they're behind this?" Several of the gathered officers demanded more information, while Barker just frowned. Ashley felt her stomach plummet. She didn't know if Cerberus could pull something like this off, but being captured by slavers and pirates were better than being in Cerberus clutches. She remembered those sick experiments all too well. But Quarians? Where was the sense in that?

"Behind it? No, I wouldn't go as far as to say that." Hackett's thundercloud grew even darker at the pronouncement. "But I can say that they're certainly involved in the abductions somehow. If you will pay attention to the holo-displays, I will show you what we've managed to recover from our efforts."

The holo displays winked out and were replaced by grainy footage of snow covered landscape, unnaturally flat and lit by the harsh white glow of neon lamps that kept the darkness at bay. A few prefab habitation units were visible at the edges of the light, but that wasn't really where she was looking at. Her attention was on the back of the fleeing Quarian, instantly recognizable by the stylized environment suits they always wore. There were other Quarians in the image, all of them armed, muzzle flashes frozen in that image as they shot at the camera.

"While the colony's surveillance and communications logs were completely wiped like all previous instances, we managed to get a stroke of luck with this case. This image was one of the few usable pieces of intel we managed to salvage from the remains of a Model 34-A YMIR Battle mech found on Freedom's Progress. Unlike the other colonies, there was significant battle damage in a localized area of the colony, and toxicology reports are positive that our samples show signs of Quarian genetic data, blood not to mince words, mixed in with the snow. We are reasonably certain that a battle took place between the Quarians and the colony mech force, though we cannot find any evidence of armed resistance from any of the marines stationed there. Given previous patterns, it is our conclusion that someone survived the attack long enough to activate the mech defenses, which are presumably immune to whatever weapon was used to disable or kill the rest of the colony. However, it is not the only piece of intel we gathered."

The holo display winked out and a fresh image took it's place. The living Quarians were gone now, replaced by dead ones. Another YMIR mech dominated the landscape, no, half of it she realized. The upper torso was being held aloft like a shield by yet another grey painted YMIR mech, tracer fire sparking off it's armoured back. Osbourne ignored the mech, highlighting a pair of human faces in the background and zooming in on them. One was a striking woman in a bodysuit that left little to the imagination, but the other was a dark skinned man dressed up in a lightly armoured suit. Both were well armed, and shooting at the LOKI mechs on scene.

Ashley didn't recognize either faces, but Osbourne apparently did because he pointed at the man on the display and elaborated. "To those who aren't familiar with the our outreach programs," He flicked an eye over to Captain Hashan, who blanched at the gesture, "this is Jacob Taylor, formerly a highly qualified raider under the less visible auspices of our Corsair initiatives who played a key role in resolving the incident with the Batarian ambassador, but now a known Cerberus operative."

"The woman on the other hand, is one Miranda Lawson, also affiliated with Cerberus. Our intelligence on her is less than complete, but information suggests that she is highly placed within the organization's hierarchy as a keystone information broker and one of the very few command operative we have managed to identify. Over the past two years, we have had next to no information on her movements at all, but given the timeline and nature of the colonist attacks, the circumstantial evidence of her and Cerberus involvement is considerably likely. I trust that I do not need to remind you gentlemen that Cerberus is a completely ruthless organization and pulling off something like this isn't outside the scope of their capabilities."

"And where do the Quarians fit in?" Someone asked the question before she realized it was her big mouth that did it.

Osbourne gave her a critical look before continuing. "Poorly. We have scoured the colony immigration records and determined that at least one Quarian arrived on the colony months ago as a technical assistant, likely as part of the Pilgrimage coming of age ritual all Quarians take."

"Or a spy for the upcoming attack" Tenma rumbled, but Osbourne denied the charge with a shake of his head.

"We thought so at first, but we've pulled up the records from previous colony attacks it doesn't match. This was an anomaly. The most probable explanation is that the Quarian managed to transmit a distress signal which the Migrant Fleet picked up and sent in an extraction team. How and why he remained unaffected by whatever it is our mystery abductor is using is still unknown at this point, however our forensics lab is ninety percent certain that at some point on Horizon, Cerberus met the Quarians, and no firefight resulted between them. Either they're working together or they were mutually disinterested in each other's business. We're exploring leads to get a bead on what the Quarians know."

"So either Cerberus knows something or is the one behind the attacks." Hackett grunted. "I don't like the idea of them having the capability of wiping out colonies without a single peep."

"I doubt any of us enjoy the idea Admiral" Osbourne replied dryly. "Cerberus has gotten the jump on us before in the tech race, which brings me to my next point."

The spook flicked off the battle footage and replaced it with another. A space station sprang into existence in the display panels, built into a huge asteroid like a giant spike. Ashley was no connoisseur of space station design, but the ramshackle design made it the ugliest station she had ever seen in her life. But what did it have to do with Cerberus.

"This is Omega station, a key supplier of Eezo out in the Terminus systems. As most of you are aware, SAICOM keeps a nominal eye on all known locations of strategic resources even outside of Council space. Three days ago, our contact sent us this particular footage."

Several officers swore at the sight that appeared, but Ashley simply blinked, her jaw dropping at the new image on the displays. It was a picture taken inside the station's docks, and gleaming against the dull and rusty deck plates of the station berths was a ship. Not just any ship. Graceful lines terminating in a slope cut nose, painted in white and black highlights, the name "NORMANDY" a silver lance on it's black hull metal, it was a ghost straight out her past. She blinked again. That double inverted 'U' had never been on the the ghost of her past before.

"The hell... that's impossible!" Hackett thundered. "Is this your idea of a joke Osbourne?"

Osbourne affected a sneer. "I don't do jokes Admiral. That is the real thing. However, it is not the original Normandy." He tapped a button and a wireframe model flowed over the ship, while a smaller duplicate appeared next to it. "Scale calculations indicates that it is at least one and a half times larger than it's predecessor, and possibly carries as much cutting edge technology inside it as the original if not more based on mass to size calculations. Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor were sighted departing from the ship that same day, putting it squarely of Cerberus origins. COINTEL is going over the shipyards responsible for Normandy's manufacture in case we have a mole funnelling intelligence and schematics, but Analysis wasn't sure why they were building a successor design until our agents on the station did a little more digging."

The display flickered again, switching to what appeared to be the security video feed from a loading platform inside the station, dully lit with emergency lights and fires merrily burning away on aircar wrecks. Dozens of armoured bodies, most of them painted in mercenary colours, littered the platform, a few brokenly twitching at their last breaths. Bone white LOKI mechs patrolled around, splashed with blood or covered in soot as they mechanically executed the few remaining wounded survivors. A grey painted YMIR mech loomed over a bleeding human, twitching with pain while another human backed away, spent medigel packets in hand. Something about the way it was painted with that red stripe on it's shoulder niggled at Ashley's memory, but it was lost as the spook continued.

"Again, both Cerberus operatives are present at this battlefield, and as you will note, accompanied by the same mech that was with them on Freedom's Progress. This is the crucial part." Osbourne pressed another button and the camera zoomed in, becoming grainier. Audio cut in at the same time, the ragged breathing of the wounded man loud in the silence of the room.

"THEY WILL ASK QUESTIONS. YOU WILL TELL THEM THAT I HAVE CAUSED THIS"

"Who... who are you?"

"I AM COMMANDER SHEPARD."

The flat tones of the YMIR's booming voice echoed in the room, but the silence from the assembled officers continued well after it had faded away into nothing. Then all at once the room exploded into a beehive of activity, several officers trading theories, while a few demanded more answers from the spook. Ashley just sat there in immobile silence, trying to absorb what she was looking at while a her chest simply went numb seeing that red stripe on grey armour for what it really was. But the numbness was quickly replaced by a growing ball of anger at what she was looking at. How dare they do this to his name. How dare they take what they had no right to and put it on a damned machine!

"This is bullshit. There's no way that's the commander." She began heatedly, cutting through the chattering officers, insubordination be damned. "It's got to be a trick."

Hackett gave her an appraising look, but the rest of the officers only spared her a glance before the spook cut in.

"Obviously," Osbourne began with a voice that dripped sarcasm, "we are not seriously considering the claims of it being the actual Shepard of two years ago anywhere near factual. What Cerberus hopes to gain from such a blatantly false imposter, we cannot guess, but they are not an organization to do things with half measures. The resources they put into constructing a copy of the Normandy suggests that they at least believe that the mech is Shepard or that the galaxy should, and that is of significant concern."

"Even discounting their intentions, the performance data we recorded alone is alarming. The person shown in the footage was successfully taken into SAICOM custody two days ago and has been debriefed. I do not exaggerate when I say this new development by Cerberus has the potential to be as threatening as the colony abductions. Under the guise of a prototype field test, the mech was delivered into the custody of the Eclipse mercenaries shown here, where it promptly reprogrammed their entire mech arsenal, despite being code locked, in less than a minute to begin an effective purge operation. SAICOM cryptanalysis specialists are unanimous on their conclusions, this is a level of performance found only in magnitude 6 artificial intelligences and above. I believe we are all familiar with the threat that synthetics pose to galactic stability, and with our extensive dependence on mech units to supplement our waning force levels, this new development is disturbing to say the least." He shifted his head towards Barker. "Which is why you are here I suspect Lieutenant Barker."

The man shrugged and rose from his seat. "Director Osbourne is correct in this matter. The footage you saw came from one of the security systems on Omega, fairly discreet, but easily hacked and data-mined unfortunately. We do not possess a monopoly on this information."

"Wonderful, so the council knows." Tenma rolled his eyes. "Let me guess. They're demand- I mean 'asking' us to destroy that Cerberus AI while they sit around on comfy chairs and look outraged?" This met with a chorus of grumbled assent from the other captains. Ashley nearly added her own voice to the chorus, but held her tongue at the last minute. It was so easy to dismiss the idea that the mech was Shepard in the heat of the moment, but now, she wasn't as sure as she was earlier.

Barker cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Not quite Captain Tenma. While the majority of the Council is indeed aware of the existence of this footage and share the opinion that what we are seeing is indeed an artificial intelligence, they are not in favour of it's immediate destruction. I am also given to understand that they intended to activate one of their SPECTRE agents with orders to capture the unit reasonably intact to facilitate it's study so that countermeasures can be developed."

"That's the first sensible decision I've heard them make all year." Hashan muttered aloud, a statement Ashley empathetically shared, but had not voiced. "So what's the catch?"

"None at first glance." Barker cleared his throat uncomfortably. "However, Councillor Anderson believes that should the council SPECTRE agent succeed in acquiring the unit intact, the Systems Alliance will not be privy to the research effort in studying it. While the Council purpose is ostensibly to serve all the races within Citadel space, their choice of agent in this particular matter is Lakus, a veteran from the First Contact war and significantly opposed to humanities admission to the Citadel."

Hacket grunted loudly. "Just like Saren was. Not a particularly bright move on their part. What did Anderson have to say about that?"

"I am given to understand that he has argued for a grace period in which Systems Alliance will be permitted to act as they see fit in order to resolve this matter, and the Council has agreed to a period of two months to produce evidence that the AI has either been destroyed or captured, provided that it does not show up in Council space. If that happens, they will act as they see fit. Furthermore, there is an additional condition, in that the team assigned to this matter will be working together with a salarian STG team, and that the team leader be one whom they are familiar with." Barker turned to Ashley, but she could already guess what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. "That is where you come in Chief Williams. Your name was specifically forwarded by the STG captain to be the commander of the Alliance team on this matter."

With a tap of a button, a familiar salarian face flashed onto one of the the holo displays.

"I believe you have already met Captain Kirrahe."

* * *

_Meanwhile..._

As far as heavy weapons went, Garrus had seen more of the M-100 Grenade Launcher than any other in his time on Omega. Cheap, durable, reasonably powerful with it's large ammo drum, the mercenaries and vorcha on the station had particularly favoured the weapon for it's low cost versatility among their heavies. Garrus had training in the use of heavy weapons, the same as every other turian who'd gone through basic training, but he'd never liked the things. Loud and flashy things were never his style, especially when a single bullet through the visor a klick and a half away could do the job, and grenade launchers were one of the noisiest. This particular specimen sitting in front of him was it's larger cousin, the M-110A, far less popular with mercenaries due to it's normally static nature. With a bore size nearly doubled for a larger calibre of grenade, and a much larger munitions drum, so fresh off the ship's fabricators that it still had a mirror sheen to it, the grenade launcher was only practical as a crew served or vehicle mounted weapon. If grenade launchers were clumsy, bulky things, this one looked like it had been designed by and for an oversized krogan who regularly snacked on growth hormones.

But since it wasn't meant for him, he continued to strip away at most of it's extraneous components. Like the trigger. Fingers were needed for that, and Shepard was a little lacking in that department. He could see how to mount the weapon on the shoulder and connect it to one of the data ports available in the mech's back for control purposes, but how the Commander was going to be able to command it was outside his field. They taught you how to jury rig weapons in the advanced classes of military school, not brain surgery. 'Give it a try anyway', Shepard had more or less said when Garrus had objected to the request, 'we need more firepower for groundside operations'. How much more firepower you needed when you were literally a war machine, Garrus didn't really know, but feeling the scars on his face, he could make a good guess as to what had prompted it. That, and the fact that he'd confided in their next destination.

Sunny, scenic, Korlus, murder capital of the Terminus systems, free smog and all the stripped out ship hulks you could ever want, if you stuck to the nicer parts of the planet that is. Mercs, murderers and shady gangs, it was kind of like Omega, if Omega was a garbage scow with a climate and a government. Knowing Shepard, their trip planet side was going to involve a lot of explosions, gunfire and general mayhem. He chuckled, it'd be the case even if he went someplace nice, like the Citadel, so going down to a piece of Omega-lite warranted a little something extra could come in handy.

The other Cerberus operative manning the armoury, Jacob, he'd offered to help with the project, but Garrus had waved him off. Shepard might be stuck having to trust these guys not to slip him an exploding battery in maintenance, but he wasn't going to let them fiddle with something the commander had personally asked him to do no matter how politely they asked. Garrus had done his best to minimize the risk, stripping out the munitions and leaving only just enough hardware to fully run the interface system without them actually doing anything. Even the most basic of diagnostics systems wouldn't strain with this configuration, but he had no idea how an organic brain would handle a direct connection like this. He only hoped he didn't fry the commander's brain by accident doing this. That would be the crowning irony.

His musings were interrupted halfway when the door to the armoury hissed open and an unfamiliar face stepped through. Garrus didn't recognize the broken horned salarian, but being the only one on board the Normandy, his identity was easily guessed. "Doctor Mordin right?" He waved a hand over and stepped over the disassembled parts of the grenade launcher. "Heard a lot of good things about you back on Omega, running that free clinic in the Gozu district. I understand Shepard helped you cure the plague?"

The salarian briefly nodded before launching into a fast moving stream of words. "Shepard reactivated district environmental controls, inserted plague vaccine into central distribution chambers." He cleared his throat. "Not the only one with positive reputation on Omega. Understand that you went under the alias of Archangel, successful vigilante, much hated by all mercenaries."

He chuckled at the salarian's rapid fire speech, but something about way the doctor held himself caught his eye and sent his analytical mind to work. It would have been easy not to notice, there was only a slight difference in posture, but he'd seen and fought too many professional salarian mercenaries to miss it now. The good doctor hadn't always been a doctor, and Garrus was betting he had more tricks up his sleeve than that auto pistol hanging by his waist. It didn't necessarily have any sinister meanings to it, but it did explain how he'd kept the free clinic going in Gozu without being hassled by the Suns into shutting down. "It wasn't easy getting that way. I really had to work at it. Of course now that I'm 'dead', they'll probably find someone else to gun after. Anyway, I was about to go down to the galley and grab a bite to eat, do you want to come along?"

"Actually, wanted to talk." The doctor hesitated, holding up a triple digit hand before following after Garrus to the lift. "Psychological matters."

Uh oh. That silent part of Garrus's mind went off with sudden concern. It didn't take a genius to figure out who he was talking about. The lift doors sealed shut with a hiss of hydraulics before the Garrus motioned for the doctor to continue.

"Understand that previous acquaintance with Shepard has provided significant experience with his personality. Have psychological records of course, but personal experience important to contrast against remote observations." He paused for all one tenth of a second before continuing with a shrug. "Would prefer if discussion were held in lab, would not violate patient doctor sacred trust."

For his part, Garrus only shook his head. "Don't worry about it. There's not much to say about the Commander that Cerberus hasn't already figured out Mordin, not if they spent all that time and money bringing him back. What do you want to know about anyway?"

"Personal experience valuable in detecting changes in personality. Especially following traumatic changes. Research on such matters indicated patient would suffer immediate psychological breakdown, would like to determine if any differences in personality have been noticed given Shepard's current condition."

Mandibles flared out in surprise at the doctor's calm pronouncement. "Psychological breakdown? He seemed- wait. What previous research?"

Mordin blinked once with his bulbous eyes. "Research into full body cybernetic transfer. Only study group level of course, determine possible advantages and disadvantages. Studies concluded existing methods too risky, destabilizing to mental integrity, loss of identity, further research discontinued. Cerberus obviously have determined viable method of transplant while preserving personality, but unsure on long term sustainability."

"You're worried he'll go crazy and you're looking for early signs?" Garrus shook his head at the doctor's nod. It felt wrong, talking about Shepard like this. But the doctor's concerns were valid, he'd had them himself, if not in as much detail. "I've had the same worries too, but I really don't know Mordin. It's too early to say. He's a lot more abrupt when he's talking, but that seems to be the limitation on the hardware side. What I'm really worried about is how the prolonged sensory loss is going to effect him. I know humans handle sensory loss better than turians, but this is kind of an extreme case. I don't know how it'll affect him, but I doubt it'll be anything good. Still he seems pretty norm-" He broke off halfway as the lift doors slid open and a familiar voice wafted through the air.

"Uh... Commander? Could you stop staring at me like that, it's a bit disturbing. I know I asked if you're coming back meant you were going to eat our brains, but come on, that was a joke. I mean... you're not going to eat my brain, right? No mouth and all..."

Garrus exchanged a look with Mordin and then hurried out of the lift to find the imposing back of Shepard's YMIR body blocking his way, sensor pod focused solely on Joker. The helmsman was seated at the mess table, fidgeting uncomfortably while the fork in his hand occasionally poked at the gelatinous substances on his plate. There was a faint whine of servos as the mechanized commander shifted his ponderous weight from one foot to the other, but it was lost as his voice boomed in the small confines of the crew deck.

"I KNOW"

The helmsman started at the voice, darting a look at his food and back at the Shepard. "Oh right... the food. And the whole not eating bit. Well, that's not really reassuring Shepard. No offence, but seriously, it kinda feels like the dog I had when I was a kid at the dinner table, looking all sad and forlorn until we fed it something." He paused, eyes flicking towards Garrus with a look that shouted 'help me out here'. "If it was all steroids and armour plate with a really mean stare that'd probably burn holes through paper, you know what I mean?"

Garrus looked at Shepard, back at Joker and shrugged, lost for any words to say. The scene in the mess hall felt far too surreal to step into. Shepard didn't say anything at all, and continued to stare at Joker, or more specifically, his plate. Joker rallied to it's defence, trying to position himself between the plate and glowing optics. "Besides, you really wouldn't want this stuff even if you could eat it. It tastes like crap and wobbles like jello, eugh." He stressed the words by poking at an unidentifiable brown mass on the plate, setting it to wobbling in ways that Garrus was certain nothing edible should maintain. "See?"

The commander continued to say a great deal of nothing, with only the faint hum of his life support systems audible. Joker held his position for a few more seconds in the silence but his eyes uncomfortably darted from one side to the other. "Right," he broke the silence a full ten seconds into the silence, "I think I'm done here. I'm going to stand over there, waaaay over there by the medbay." He was already on his feet by then, finishing the sentence while he limped away as quickly as his feet could carry him.

With a hiss of shoulder hydraulics, the Commander extended a massive arm, touching the tip of the gun sheathes to the gelatinous blocks on Joker's abandoned plate. It bent to his touch, and then sprang back into it's original cubical shape, rocketing off the plate as it did to land on the table with a wet splat.

Garrus turned back to the doctor, catching the salarian's eye with a flare of his mandibles.

"No doc. He seems pretty normal to me. The food though..."

* * *

**A/N:**

**And 06 is done, with a few signs of the changes to come, thanks to mecha-Shep's new behaviour and appearance. Not to mention Gardner's chef surprise, if by surprise, you mean nightmare. You'd think that with two centuries on, MREs would only improve in flavour, but apparently in the future, not everything is better. They get worse, or start defying physics.**

**As to Shep's mental state, well... it's just outside looking in at the moment, but you have to wonder at the mental health of someone who wants to eat that stuff. As long as he doesn't go stir crazy with his new toys though, he should be fine. Who's going to fly the gunship? Wait and see.  
**

**I tried to see what I could do to change Mordin's recruitment, but honestly, there wasn't much that would have made a difference from a story perspective. He'd still go in, blast everything that gave him the eye, talk to Mordin, shoot some more, and put the cure in. As to his class background, he's pretty much locked in as a soldier class now. An infiltrator would have shot himself in the current circumstances.**


	7. Chapter 07: Field Trip

**Chapter 07: Going somewhere nice**

Kenneth Donnelly had a fixed expression of concentration on his face, focused on the enemy in front of him. He wasn't a soldier by trade, but this went beyond knowing how to shoot a guy a klick away or kick someone in the daddy bags. This was engineer against conundrum, man against nature, and he wasn't about to let some pint sized terror make him turn tail, his honour was at stake dammit. With her arms crossed, well away from the immediate danger, Gabriella smirked at his imminent demise, watching the engineer struggle against the odds. "Go on Kenneth, it's waiting for you," she teased, "it's only so small after all, it won't bite."

Kenneth took the opportunity to glance away from the focus of their wager, but his eyes kept being dragged back to the... thing. It was like a bloody accident, you didn't want to look, but you just had to. "Quiet woman, it's small in size, but it packs a wallop that'd send you crying like a wee girl to your ancestors, don't you doubt it. You'll not unman me with your tricks and jibes... I just need a little time to prepare myself."

"Or think up an excuse so you won't have to go through with it then," she mocked lightly, raising one damnably maddening eyebrow. "Give it up Kenneth, you're not fooling me with that outraged expression of yours, you know it's more than you can handle."

The engineer leaped to his feet with an outraged expression, stabbing a mock accusatory finger at his partner in crime. "Ohh, now you've done it woman. You're insulting a man's honour, that's a crime it is, a Donnelly never goes back on his word." With that, he scooped the bouncing cuboid object of his plate and stuck it in his mouth. Almost at once the burst of... it wasn't flavour, there was no merciful court or vengeful god in the universe that would call it that, it hit the engineer so bad his traitorous gut demanded it be spat out right now and he wash his mouth with something less objectionable, like the liquid lithium in the heat exchange loops. He resisted, this was an honour challenge damnit, and not even that devil in an apron couldn't force a proud Donnelly to back down once he'd agreed to take Gardner's meatloaf down in one go.

Gabriella laughed, rocking on her heels as Kenneth valiantly chewed away at the offending meal. "You look completely ridiculous like that Kenneth," she burst between giggles, "you've turned green, but you're not growing any bigger or stronger."

Outrage and determination fought for control over Kenneth's mouth and it resulted in a draw when a morsel slid down the wrong throat, and ended up being ejected across the floor to hit Gabriella in the bosom. A glass of water, napkins and a short yelling from mess sergeant Gardner later, the two had settled on a slightly more amicable set of freeze dried rations that tasted like ass but was far better in Kenneth's opinion than anything the mess sergeant touched. Taking a bite out of the rapidly disappearing ration bar, the chief engineer looked at it with a critical eye before putting it down. "Tastes like ass, but better than the ass Rupert makes out of the rations," he began in his accented voice, "can't imagine why the commander would want to give it a go when he's spared the horrors. You'd think he was round the bend, wanting to eat something like this."

Gabriella cocked an eyebrow over her rations and gave him a level "this-could-spell-trouble" look, but she answered anyway. "He probably just wants to see what it's like, you know, find out why everyone thinks its so bad. Hadley doesn't mind the chef's surprise so much as you do, so who knows, he might even like it if he could eat it."

"Damnit woman, it'd take an insane man to want to eat something like this, an insane starving man on his last legs, and you can'nae convince me otherwise on that fact. The commander's a human, but now he's gone and gotten all cyclopean eye with nary a thing between his legs if you know what I mean. He's got the stones to take it to the Collectors and give them a kick where it really matters, but a man can only take so much before he goes stir crazy you know that girl, and you can't be seriously thinking that he'd get all metalled up like that and not go a little funny in the head before long. In fact, I hear he even wanted to eat one of that devil's concoctions earlier, and you know what that'll do to your innards."

"I can hear your bellyaching all the way from here Donnelly," Gardner yelled from his corner of the galley, tearing off his apron with a sharp snap of food spattered fabric. A small electrical lighter sprouted from his fingers and the mess sergeant stabbed it accusingly at the engineer like a knife. "You want to try taking over this job while I treat the engines to a little Rupert special instead?"

"Don't you dare even dream of it you scalawag, you touch my beautiful engines and I'll hang you by your stones, devil cooking or no devil cooking." Kenneth raised a mock fist of anger as he growled possessively.

"Hah," Gardner sneered derisively at the engineer's defence, "just keep talking like that, and you might end up with something real special the next time you come here." Kenneth quailed at the way the man's eyes were glinting in the light, while Gabby, traitorous woman she was, just snickered at him. "The commander doesn't mind about what I do with the rations we have, and I don't hear him complaining about the quality of my food."

"Aye, and that's why I think he's starting to go around the bend, there's not a sane man breathing that'd be able to keep down the horrors you make out of perfectly good rations and should know well enough to keep away from it, even if he doesn't have a mouth to eat with." Kenneth and Gardner sobered up as last of the words finished their faint echoing in the halls of the crew deck. The mess sergeant had been there to see it himself, and both the engineers had heard the stories that made their way around a ship this small faster than the events themselves. The stories changed, depending on who was doing the telling, but everyone agreed that in the last rotational shift, commander Shepard had come down to the galley, intimidated his buddy and helmsman out of a meal and started playing with it. "The man's got a plan for the Collectors and I'm glad for that don't you doubt," Kenneth started quietly, "but he wasn't acting like this the first time he came aboard."

Gabby shook her head, "Aw, come on Ken, everyone's entitled to a few eccentricities, and fooling around with the food isn't that hard to figure out. Like I said, I bet the commander just wants to find out what all the fuss is, and probably misses being able to eat," she shuddered, "even if it is Rupert doing the cooking."

But Kenneth wasn't so easily convinced, downing the last of his ration bar and answering between mouthfuls and putting on a serious face. "Ach Gabby, you and your rational mind will be the death of all the fun of speculation on this ship. But what if this is just the start of things, the same way a junkie gets all messed up in the head if he can't get a new hit, it could be serious you know? I'm not saying we should be too worried about his marbles yet, but-"

"But nothing Kenneth," Patel's voice cut through the engineer's worries as the auxiliary pilot stepped into the galley, hands on her hips, "Gabriella is right, the commander isn't having a good time of things with his body the way things are, so cut him a bit of slack while he adjusts why don't you? Besides, I bet Lawson has Doctor Solus working on a solution already."

Kenneth ran his fingers through his red hair, the grimace continuing well past Patel's argument. "Ah come on girl, you seriously expect the salarian of all the crew to come up with a solution to just like that? I mean, no offence to the doctor, I'm sure he's every bit as talented as they say he is, but isn't he supposed to be working on a solution to the Collectors first and foremost? If he can deal with that and Shepard's problem at the same time, we might as well be sitting back and watching him come up with a gadget to make the Collectors go away forever."

Rupert shook his head in disbelief "Donnelly, give the commander a little credit will ya? He's tougher and a lot smarter than you make him sound, sure it's no namby pamby injury, but I'd bet my galley that he'll pull through long enough for a fix to be found or he'll make one himself, count on it. He lost a head back on Omega after all and came back from it none the worse for wear with a bonus prize to boot." He turned his head towards the auxiliary pilot with a nod and a toss of a ration, "how's that working out for you anyway Patel, going to graduate from the Kodiak to a combat pilot?"

"Not as easy as I hoped it'd be Rupert," Patel admitted, catching the ration bar with a practised hand and a shrug, "the Mantis handles a lot differently from the kind of ships I used to train on, a lot twitchier than the shuttle that's for sure. I can fly it, if that's what you're asking, even fly air support like the commander wants, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous." She shrugged with an unconcerned air that wasn't very convincing, "Fuchisky Orbital trained me a lot on all the kinds of military ships they built, but it's been a long time since I flew as a fighter jock in live combat."

Rupert digested her words with a disgruntled look, scratching his chin in contemplation before speaking up. "You don't really sound confident that you can pull it off Patel, are you sure about this?" He kept his voice studiously neutral, but the mess sergeant's expression was decidedly concerned.

Patel chewed on her lip before responding with an empathic nod, "I may not be the galaxy's best fighter jock, but I'm a good enough pilot to do what Shepard is asking from me. Besides, who else is going to fly that thing when he goes groundside, you? Jeff's not going to leave that chair up on the helm anytime soon, heck, if he could go without eating, sleeping or a visit to the can, he'd probably glue himself to the helm, so that just leaves me as the only other dedicated pilot to do the job." She grinned suddenly, "anyway, it'll give me a chance to really hit the Collectors when we meet up with them, not just drop off the commander and his team while I hang around in orbit until they call me, and you can bet a years salary that I'm not going to turn down that opportunity."

"YOU WILL GET IT SOON ENOUGH"

The booming announcement had everyone at the impromptu gathering whirling towards the sound, Gabriella and Patel halfway to a salute when they realized that it hadn't come from the commander's vocalizer, but rather, the ships intercom system. Light flared for a brief moment over EDI's holographic display terminal, but instead of the pulsing blue orb that was the ship's AI, the Cyclopean head of commander Shepard was displayed instead. Universally open mouthed at the unexpected presence of the commander on the terminal, it took several seconds of silence before Kenneth asked the question that was on all their minds. "Didn't know you could could show up on EDI's terminal sir. The design specifications pretty much make it a physically closed loop, not really any openings to jack yourself into."

The sensor pod bobbed in acknowledgement of the question... "I KNOW" ...without giving an answer at all, briefly setting Kenneth into a fit of internal panic about how much the commander had seen before his impromptu hello. The optics flicked briefly as they refocused, and the pod turned towards Patel who finally completed her salute, with Gabriella following a heartbeat later.

"WE ARE ON THE FINAL APPROACH TO KORLUS. REPORT TO THE HANGER BAY FOR PRE-FLIGHT CHECKS"

Patel saluted again and scurried off to the central elevator, but instead of the display winking out once she was gone, the holographic head of commander Shepard flicked over to the mess sergeant.

"ABOUT THAT LIST OF INGREDIENTS YOU MENTIONED RUPERT SEND IT TO ME. THE CREW NEEDS TO MAINTAIN GOOD MORALE WHERE IT CAN BE HELPED"

For a second, Kenneth could have sworn on his ancestors graves that the Cyclopean eye had focused on him before turning back to Rupert, the suggestion of a smirk left on immobile armour plate.

"ESPECIALLY IF CERTAIN QUARTERS BELIEVE THAT I HAVE... LOST MY MARBLES"

* * *

Losing his marbles, his instructors back in the N program would not have been so kind with their descriptions if they could see him now as another missile zipped by, close enough that it's exhaust washed over his sensor pod with a spray of caustic gases.

_"It's weird sir, we're coming in hot, but there's not enough ground fire to account for all the anti-aircraft defences orbital recon painted. I can see a lot muzzle flashes down on the ground, but it's not coming our way, I guess they're having problems of their own."_

Strapped under the gunship like a hanging fruit, the only place large enough to accommodate his bulk, watching the ground ripple with anti-aircraft fire, he could only be thankful for small mercies like that. The mantis gunship lurched and jinked again in an attempt to dodge unseen fire, and Shepard caught the supersonic roar of it's passage after the missile passed them by close enough that they flew through it's exhaust. For the umpteenth time, he reviewed the decision to choose the better armed but less stealthy craft to make the combat drop with. Distracted some of them might be, but the Blue Suns who weren't were doing everything in their power to shoot them down, and his bulk and position meant that if they did connect with a shot, he'd take the brunt of it. Being a human shield was not what they taught you in marine academy.

An internal altimeter toned off in his consciousness, and the battery of optics that fed him sight whirred into place with mechanical precision, scanning the rapidly closing ground below for entrenched positions and troop movements. The Apatku continent on Korlus was a single sprawling mass of gutted starships, shanty towns and scrap factories, the entire landmass designated a ship graveyard centuries before humankind had flown among the stars. Races of all kinds came here to discard their ships once they were no longer spaceworthy, letting them plummet in a controlled descent down to the surface where they joined thousands of other hulks ranging from pleasure craft to decommissioned military warships. Their target on this planet lay deep in the restricted military zone, where the partially stripped derelicts of century old dreadnoughts had become the home of the local Blue Suns chapter, a ring of massive, still functional anti-orbital guns protecting it from orbital attack. But their defences against low flying aircraft were limited by comparison, a fatal mistake he was now exploiting. He selected an drop zone, simultaneously evaluating the advantages while formulating his entry strategy. With a mental command, he activated his command circuits, speaking without a voice to the gunship's pilot.

_"ECHO TWO UPDATE ON LANDING ZONE COORDINATES. ZERO THREE DEGREES PORT TWO POINT SEVEN KILOMETRES AHEAD BY THE FRIGATE HULK. APPROACH FOR A FAST AERIAL DROP THEN LOOP AND DISEMBARK."_

_"Two point seven klicks..." _Patel obediently repeated the instructions, but trailed off as she found his marked point_, "that's right on top of an active gun nest commander, we're going to take a lot of fire that way."_

_"AN ACCEPTABLE TRADE. THE OTHER ANTI-AIRCRAFT POSITIONS WILL NOT HAVE A CLEAR LINE OF FIRE IF WE TAKE THIS APPROACH. FLY US IN LOW AND FAST UNTIL WE REACH THE DROP ZONE. ASCEND AND RELEASE AT THREE HUNDRED METRES._" He waited for her acknowledgement, and then switched over to the squad command circuit, but that had been apparently anticipated because it crackled with an amused voice before he could speak.

_"A hot drop in this kind of environment commander? You sure know how to pick them," _Garrus commented over the communication circuits,_ "So what's the deal with Okeer anyway, I know he's working on some kind of krogan cloning program, but we're not here for that are we?"_

_"WE ARE NOT HERE ABOUT THE CLONES BUT HOW HE IS CREATING THEM. INTELLIGENCE SUGGESTS THAT HE IS USING COLLECTOR TECHNOLOGY TO ACHIEVE THIS. IF HE HAS A LINK TO THE COLLECTORS HE MAY KNOW MORE ABOUT WHAT GOALS THEY HAVE WITH THE COLONISTS"_

_"Except his merc friends don't feel like letting anyone in to talk, so we go in guns blazing and asking questions of what's left. Just like old times, eh commander, except without the wheels and heavy suspension to take the hit."_ Garrus chuckled, _"I'll admit I don't miss the Mako much, but it feels a lot more reassuring going down in that tin can than these drop packs_."

_"Quit your bellyachin Turian,"_ Zaeed cut into the channel with a gruff snort, "_you think this is bad, using fancy toys with eezo cores and thrusters to make a jump from a gunship? Try hanging like a bloody fruit from an oversized hankie and praying the goddamn infantry on the ground don't think it's funny to make you eat your weight in slugs or tearing up your chute so you make a bleeding stain in the ground. Going down with drop packs is a walk in the Presidium by comparison_."

_"That sounds rather primitive, people still use chutes for combat jumps like this?"_

_"What do you sodding think, that every merc company fights with their troops in fancy hard suits and kinetic barriers? Most fights, you'd be goddamn lucky to get a packet of medigel and a mass accelerator instead of a canteen of dirty water and a bleeding chemical slug thrower."_

_"CUT THE CHATTER PEOPLE. WE ARE APPROACHING THE TARGET ZONE" _Shepard rumbled through the communication channels, making adjustments to his tactical entry as the mercenaries continued to move. Zaeed hadn't been his first choice to bring on the drop, not when he didn't know enough about the man's temperament to judge how well he'd work with the others, but other than Garrus, he'd been the only one with the training necessary to use the notoriously difficult infantry drop packs without splattering himself all over the ground. The rest of the team had to stay behind on the Normandy, waiting for his squad to call in reinforcements at a cleared landing zone or risk getting blown up out of the sky like he was doing. As if the thought had summoned them, the gun nest began to sparkle with muzzle flashes, the infantry weapons doing little harm at this range, but quickly becoming more accurate as they closed. With a thought, he turned the circuit back to the pilot,_ "ECHO TWO TARGET THE NEST WEAPONS FREE"_

_"Wilco commander, engaging the nest and going weapons free."_ The gunship bucked slightly as it engines redirected their power, dropping even further to the terrain while his audio sensors picked up the faint click of safety interlocks releasing amidst the screaming winds. In front of him, the autocannon shroud parted and the twin barrels of death extended from within, swivelling towards their doomed targets. _"Echo two, Fox Four."_

Slipstream and engine howls were drowned out by the roar of the gunship autocannons roared to life, muzzle flashes twinkling faster than his optics could record as a stream of tracer fire burned a dotted line across the skies down into the gun nest. Return fire died almost immediately as mercenaries dove for cover against the storm of steel, armour piercing slugs scything down the missile battery crew who hadn't been fast enough. Only a few of the foolhardy sticking their heads out to shoot back with wildly inaccurate fire a handful of shots sparking off gunship armour or his kinetic barriers . The distance between gunship and mercenaries rapidly began to shrink as Patel gunned the engines even harder, the battered gun nest looming widely into his view _"PREPARE FOR DROP. INITIATE CLAMP RELEASE ON MY MARK"_

The roar of the autocannons prevented him from hearing the whirring of the rear troop doors, but the faint jolt that travelled through his frame told him that Patel had deployed them. He started up an internal count, the numbers rapidly dwindling as the Patel began to boost away from ground in preparation of the drop. In the distance, one of the mercenaries popped out of cover long enough to hold up a man portable missile launcher, but it was too late.

_"MARK"_

With a sharp series of pings, explosive bolts blasted away at the locks holding him to the gunship, and Shepard fell free, streaking across the sky in a deadly ballistic trajectory. The mercenary fired, a puff of smoke and a brilliant flare of light announcing to the world that a package of explosives was now streaking towards someone, the dull warning tone in his mind telling Shepard that someone was him. In the space of a second, he watched as the missile leaped into away from the ground and into the sky, roaring towards him and rapidly growing in size until he triggered the drop package. With the simultaneous crack of a dozen explosive bolts, the aerodynamic shell he'd been concealed in split into four parts and blasted away from his falling form, decoy emitters in their panels broadcasting a tastier target for the missile targeting systems to lock on to. They worked as advertised, the missile suddenly spiking from it's trajectory to chase one of the spinning shells while his internal altimeter beeped as he hit the preset height.

The world distorted and lurched around Shepard as the micro eezo core of the drop package strapped onto him hummed to electric life, reducing his mass to a fraction of his real weight while nozzle caps shot free and solid fuelled rocket motors ignited with a plume of brilliant azure flames, rapidly slowing down his descent from breakneck velocity to merely unsafe speeds. At twelve meters off the ground, the rockets cut out, and the package jettisoned away, dropping him in free fall to the deck. His two tonne frame struck the centre of the nest with the resounding clang of metal and the groan of buckling hull plate, the impact throwing mercenaries off their feet and sending their weapons flying out of stunned fingers. One tried to rise to his feet, weapon still in hand when a burst of fire from above cut him down, Zaeed and Garrus descending the last few meters on plumes of rocket fire with their rifles at the ready.

The mercenaries were starting to regain their senses, a few scrabbling for cover against the coming firefight, but Shepard was already moving, shock absorbing hydraulic clamps disengaging from his legs while an internal tone indicated his weapons were now active. The autocannon roared to life, cutting down the exposed mercenaries with a rapid fire stream of slugs while Garrus and Zaeed jettisoned their drop packs, sweeping out to secure the nest and adding their own fire to the mix. Mercenary held mass accelerators chattered amidst the roar of his autocannon, their fire registering as brilliant blue sparks of light as the projectiles crumpled against his kinetic barriers.

With a whir of servo motors, Shepard's shoulder mounted grenade launcher swivelled free from it's safe position, the independent sensor suite feeding him data as the weapon swivelled to track a cluster of mercenaries in the open. The supersonic crack of it's payload was punctuated by the roar of the two kilogramme warhead detonating against fragile kinetic barriers and armour plate, instantly pulverizing the mercenaries. Heat waves radiated away from the barrel, distorting his vision slightly, but it didn't stop him from swinging the weapon with mechanical precision to acquire another group of defenders, violently scattering them with another 80mm shell in their midst.

A few others scattered and hunkered behind debris and hulks of the battlefield, seeking shelter, but Zaeed already had a grenade sliding into the underbarrel launcher of his rifle. The launcher thumped hollowly, and the din of the battlefield was temporarily drowned out by the sudden roar of an inferno grenade and the screams of living torches as they stumbled blindly into the open. A series of single rifle shots cracked in the space of a second, and the burning mercenaries collapsed in smoldering heaps. At the sight, two of the Blue Suns threw their weapons and ran for the exits, but a burst of Shepard's autocannon caught them across the back, sending them tumbling off the edge of the frigate.

In the end, their numbers were too few, and too disorientated, to put up much of a resistance against the intruders, their disorganized defences falling apart only seconds after Shepard and his team landed. The ones who still had enough sense to hold onto their guns were rapidly dispatched before they could even scream for aid into their communicators, the only survivor of the gun nest lying crumpled against the bulkhead of a gutted shuttle, trying to staunch the wound in his gut with his hands. Zaeed stepped away from a corpse he had just fired two rounds into, spared the injured mercenary a contemptuous look and levelled his assault rifle at the man when Shepard blocked his line of fire with an upheld autocannon.

_"THIS ONE HAS ANSWERS TO GIVE FIRST."_

Zaeed's perpetual scowl didn't change, but the mercenary nodded and lowered his rifle, turning back to the other bodies on the battlefield and making doubly sure that they were dead by firing into them. Garrus shook his head from where he stood guard, clearly wanting to say something, but the returning gunship crackled onto the communications circuit and took priority.

_"Echo two here, I'm close to bingo fuel, do you need anything while I'm still on station?"_

_"NO NEED ECHO TWO WE HAVE IT COVERED. RTB BUT BE ON CALL FOR A STRIKE SORTIE IF WE NEED IT." _Shepard paused for a moment, and then let the professionalism lapse to ask, _"STILL NERVOUS"_

Patel snorted over the encrypted channel as the gunship's engines took on a higher pitch, arcing the craft up into the stratosphere and beyond. _"Still am sir, but not so much now, thanks for asking. Echo two RTB."_

Shepard watched the gunship disappear into the upper atmosphere, certain that it was out of the range of enemy anti-aircraft batteries before he turned back to their temporary prisoner. Garrus was already there, but the mercenary was in a world of his own and paid neither the former Spectre nor turian any attention. "Shit, shit, shit, it won't stop bleeding," the man whimpered as blood oozed thickly from his stomach wound and out between his fingers, only turning his attention to his captors after Shepard had stepped right up to the man. The Suns mercenary rolled a pained eye at Garrus, gasping out an accusation between groans. "A turian, should have known you weren't with the Korlus regulars...aggh, what's the matter, going to have your mech finish me off instead of doing it yourself?

Garrus took a look at Shepard out of the corner of his eye, but the former Spectre didn't respond, at least not openly. Taking the cue, Garrus crouched down by the mercenary, took out his sidearm and playing it's sights over the man's head. "I don't know," he mused with an openly wondering tone, splitting his attention between the man and the heavy pistol, "that would be a little quick for the likes of you, don't you think? Why waste a bullet when we could just leave you here, with your dead friends and no radio while you look for a nice place to bleed out." He flicked a few mandibles in morbid amusement as the mercenary paled at the vigilante's description. "It'd take maybe, two, three hours with a wound like that, and I'm no expert in human biology, but I hear having your guts torn up like that really hurts, doesn't they?" He removed one of his gloves, exposing the sharp talon-like fingers that were unique to his race, and splayed them in front of the ashen faced mercenary, "maybe I should take poke inside just to make sure that it does and learn something about how humans work on the inside, you don't mind do you? Of course, if you'd rather not, I have a nice dose of medigel here just taking up space in my backpack that might be going for the price of some good intel."

"Screw your good cop act turian, gaah, I know how this works," the mercenary tried to spit at Garrus's face, but the bloody spittle fell far short of it's target and dribbled down his boots, "you'll just leave me to die once you've gotten what you want."

The mandibles on Garrus face flared in disappointment, but Shepard put an autocannon arm between them before the vigilante could make good on his promise. With the gun sheathes on the other arm, he clamped down on the man's chest, easily lifting the struggling mercenary well above his feet in one single motion.

"DEATH COMES IN MANY FORMS QUICKLY SOMETIMES SLOWLY OFTEN PAINFULLY" the ex-spectre rumbled in harsh electronic tones, slowly increasing the pressure of his gun sheathes until the hardened chest plate creaked and groaned under his grip, "RARELY DEATH ARRIVES AFTER A LONG AND FULFILLING LIFE. WHICH ONE WILL BE YOURS"

With a whir of servos, he swung the man over the edge of the gun nest, turning his arm to let the mercenary watch the long fall to the debris littered field below. A microsecond electric impulse loosened the grip in his gun sheathes long enough for the man to feel a moment of free fall before he snapped them close over the man again, bringing his face close enough to the sensor pod that was Shepard's head, illuminating the frightened man's visage with the red glow of his optics.

"CHOOSE WISELY"

* * *

"Medical Log #1053, Day 470, it seems that we're approaching the final stages of the project goals, thought goddess knows only what that is. Okeer definitely doesn't want to remove the genophage markers, but he hasn't confided in me what he intends from all our efforts so far. Still, he seems to be satisfied with our last results. Subject 47 of batch 112 is the biggest one we've grown so far despite having a much smaller storage hump to body mass ratio compared to previous subjects, and had to be fitted with specially crafted armour. I hope this will be the one he's looking for, Okeer hasn't exactly been the most stable of lab masters, and has been getting more erratic in his rejections of late. He had me flush the entirety of batch 110 not an hour ago, including nearly two hundred samples that were not yet viable and had to be disposed of, no reasons given. Whatever he's looking for, I hope it's worth this waste of life.

Jedore on the other hand, has become increasingly agitated over the quality of Okeer's viable rejects, though for what reason, I cannot say. They are strong, healthy, and with the mnemonic imprints, capable of both walking and fighting with weapons or barehanded within seconds of decanting. They aren't fully capable of developed speech or psychologically stable at that stage, but that should pass within a week of decanting and familiarization of their surroundings and command structures, providing they live that long. I overheard from one of Jedore's troops say that they're using them as mobile target practice. It's not my place to wonder what is viable training for soldiers, but if that is what Jedore is using them for, I can't imagine why she's upset about it. Her resources have been invaluable in the running of this project, but I'm starting to wonder if it isn't a better idea to leave sooner or later before she-"

An explosion rocked the entire chamber, knocking Rana Thanoptis to the ground and sending the recording device skittering out of her hand where it dipped into one of the numerous the openings on the floor grates and vanished. The Asari cracked her forehead on the ground, and she remained stunned for a moment before she blinked and picked herself up, wondering if the mercenaries were firing one of the anti-orbital guns they had commandeered from the ship hulks that surrounded the lab. Okeer wouldn't like it if that were the case, the last time it had happened, one of the cloning tanks had developed a defect and the krogan doctor had flown into a rage that had nearly broken her neck. The second thought came on the heels of an alert on one of her security feeds, and the visuals on it was enough to leave her feeling weak in the knees.

The mech, she paid no attention, the human in dirty yellow armour, she didn't recognize, but the turian in cobalt blue tactical armour skirting around the burning hulk of a large fuel tank was a part of a nightmare she didn't ever want to encounter again. She could see no sign of the human commander the turian had served under back on Virmire, and she'd be more than shocked if the dead human was here on Korlus, but she remembered very well that the turian had been against letting her leave the facility alive for her role there. Without thinking about it, her fingers danced on the communications system, calling up the mercenaries to warn them of the coming danger before she stopped them in their tracks, the Blue Suns uncalled.

No, wait, she hadn't done anything wrong, this wasn't Virmire, she wasn't working for Saren while his Reaper overlord plotted the extinction of the galaxy, she wasn't wasting the opportunity that Shepard had given her that fateful day. She was working for Okeer, looking for something to help the Krogan race prosper again on the galactic stage, at least that's what she believed she was doing. She wasn't so sure about Jedore, but her money had made all of this possible. Still... even if she hadn't done anything, she could only imagine only one reason why the turian would come here, grim as death as he butchered his way through Jedore's troops. Rana didn't want to be around when he finally achieved his objective, not unless she wanted to stay for the nuclear fire she knew was coming. It had been the human who'd set off the bomb, but she wasn't going to stick around to see if that lesson hadn't been passed on to his subordinates.

But the shuttle was on the other side of the stripped out dreadnought that their lab was situated in, and the interlopers were between her and the fastest way out of the area. The thought of running right now and praying to the goddess that she would make it alive crossed her mind and was rejected just as quickly. Maybe she could avoid their notice and those of the mercenaries, she didn't think they would appreciate the thought of her running, maybe they wouldn't spot her in the middle of the battle, maybe they would see her first- and shoot her anyway, she wasn't going to take that chance. But if she stayed and they came here, the turian might shoot her like he had wanted to two years ago... unless she could make herself useful, but how?

Rana tapped a control on her surveillance system, disabling the network feeds to the Blue Suns, but she chewed her lips as the system continued to stream data to her, knowing it wouldn't be enough. The turian and his allies were methodically progressing through the derelict, only marginally slowing down when they ran into Jedore's entrenched troops and accelerating again once all that was left was smoke and twisted bodies seconds later. A handful of the rejected tank bred krogan ambushed them in the defunct hydroponics bay, bellowing imprinted war cries as they pounded across the walkways, firing their shotguns with a natural fluidity that belied their day old age and practical inexperience. But the mech that was with the turian made short work of them, blasting those in the distance into bloody chunks with a shoulder mounted weapon she didn't recognize, while one that came too close was swiftly knocked onto it's back with a broad sweep of a mechanical arm and had it's chest crushed into jelly by an armoured foot larger than it's head. Rana watched the carnage with mounting worry and started to wring her hands as they came steadily closer to her lab with no idea on how to prove her use presenting itself. When her eyes lighted on the security feed on the dreadnoughts former galley, an idea rapidly formed in her head, fingers quickly running down the auxiliary controls she would need to implement it. They had to be heading towards Okeer and the only open path took them through a lot of Jedore's troops, but there was power still running through a few of the dreadnoughts base systems.

"Um, ah, hello," she nervously spoke into the intercom system, making doubly sure that no one was in the room she was calling to in case she tipped off Jedore's troops to what she was doing, "can you hear me?"

The turian reacted almost instantly by whirling to the sound of her voice, but the mech surprised her by shifting it's sensor pod directly to the camera feed before he had finished turning, "WHO IS THIS" it's flat electronic voice booming in the confined spaces of the galley. Rana nearly fell backwards in surprise, eyes widening as the mech she had dismissed earlier stomped over to the hidden security camera and raised the barrel of it's weapon arm right into the lens.

"Wait wait wait, I'm not with the mercenaries, please don't shoot the camera," she nearly shrieked tearfully at the intercom, letting out a relieved breath when the mech stopped from destroying her only hope. Questions swam in and out of her head as the tatters of her composure began to reform, but the researcher couldn't pay them any heed as she looked at the machine, the only overriding thought being whether she was making a horrible mistake. "I just work here, but I don't want to," because _he_ was here she didn't add, "you're here for Okeer right, I can open up a short cut to his lab, it comes through my office, and you can avoid most of the Blue Suns this way."

The turian exchanged a look with the mech's sensor pod, extending a single doubtful mandible as he gestured with his rifle and Rana held her breath as she found herself staring at those unnerving optics again.

"PROVIDE A REASON TO TRUST YOU"

The researcher bit her lip, trying to come up with a believable excuse without condemning herself in the process, the words spilling out of her mouth as they came to her, "I want to leave, but there's too much fighting going on between the krogans, Jedore's mercenaries and you. If I try to make a break for it now, I won't be able to make it out alive without running into her mercenaries, but if you come through the short cuts, I'll know at least the way behind you is clear." She hated admitting even as much as that, there _was_ a short cut, and it would come through her office, but she didn't dare make up a lie in case they caught her in it. "Here, I'll open up the maintenance access in the galley, you should be able to bypass most of her troops through it."

At the touch of the controls, one of the sealed doors in the room flickered to life and squealed open on rusted guide rails, making Rana wince at how loud it sounded. The turian and his human companion watched the the doors open, but the mech didn't turn away from the camera, making her bite her lips in nervousness. "It's a safe passage," she went on a little unsteadily, unsure whether she was trying to convince the mech, the turian, or herself, "there's no one in those hallways, and only a few of the mercenaries on the other side. You should be able to make it through quickly before anyone notices anything wrong."

Abruptly, the visuals on her monitor flickered, going dark momentarily and sending her into a panic before they came back online, showing her the glowing red optics of the mech on every single display.

"FOUND YOU"

Rana took an unconscious step backwards as the harsh electronic voice rumbled from every speaker, nearly falling over as she stumbled back over a chair in her shock at what she was seeing. "What-what do you mean you found me, the passageway is safe, I promise, you can use it to get here much quicker than if you took the direct route. I just want to get out of here alive."

"NO DEAL"

With those parting words, the video feeds went dark and the holographic haptic interface faded, locking her out no matter how desperately she tried to reactivate them. Completely panicking now, she darted for the door and hoped that the goddess would protect her, but neither the one leading deeper into Okeer's chambers nor the one exiting to the exterior of the defunct dreadnought responded to her commands, warning red symbols telling her that she was locked in her office. She didn't stop and she didn't slow down, trying to find some means of salvation. The rejection of her offer couldn't have meant anything but the one thing she feared most, and oh goddess, they were coming here. She could hear the gunfire and screaming. The blue glow of biotics enveloped her, her weak command of the fields carelessly sweeping the entirety of her office's furnishings against the locked door in an attempt to barricade it.

The next few seconds were spent wringing her hands in worry as the gunfire rose to a crescendo pitch, when an even more powerful explosion rocked the chamber so badly it knocked her off her feet and brought her makeshift barricade tumbling down. She scrambled to her feet only in time to watch the door slide open and admit a thick cloud of acrid smoke that stung her eyes. Crimson light shown through the wispy smoke coalescing into the glowing optics of the mech as it stomped past, levelling it's weapon at her the moment it cleared the portal. Rana scrambled backwards on her hands and legs, eyes widening in horror as the mech stepped inexorably closer towards her, carelessly crushing a fallen desk light into sparking splinters underfoot. More shapes pierced through the smoke clouds, forming into the turian and human who had accompanied the mech, both of them levelling their weapons at her without a word. The doctor's retreat was stopped by the wall of her office, hands and legs continuing to push against the floor in a futile attempt to push herself through the hardened bulkhead. A frightened whimper escaped her lips as the war machine took another step closer, the ominous black barrel of it's weapon arm filling her entire sight.

"WE MEET AGAIN DOCTOR RANA"

"Again, wh-wh-what do you mean again?" Rana cast her eyes wildly about, both grateful that she wasn't dead trying yet and utterly confused as to what the machine was talking about. Wild thoughts skittered across her consciousness, one of the more poignant ones being whether she had finally cracked and was imagining her one sided conversation with a war machine. "I've never seen you before today."

"Oh, but you have seen _me _before, haven't you doctor? On a balmy planet with plenty of sun, surf, a few explosions and krogans, a nice place to have a holiday," the turian chimed in with a knowing tone. The doctor nodded silently, too focused on the barrels of their guns to even think of denying or lying at his description of Virmire, and the turian chuckled in grim amusement. "I've still got it, but it looks like you still need to work on your charm if you want to cure people of their amnesia, eh Shepard?"

The scarred human snorted but the mech turned it's sensor pod to the turian, red glowing optics flickering as it's harsh electronic voice echoed in the room, "VERY FUNNY GARRUS MAYBE YOU WOULD LIKE TO DO THE TALKING NEXT TIME"

Garrus raised a taloned hand in a gesture of denial, "You sure about this Shepard, I've got all the charm I need, but you definitely need the practice if you're going to want a shot at the ladies." He shrugged non-committally, but the flare of his mandibles were filled with mirth and the human beside him dispensed with subtlety, barking a coarse laugh at the joke. Afraid, confused, befuddled and worn out, Rana's brain tried to process everything that was happening, but it was too much to focus and she carelessly stammered out the only coherent thought she could make-

"Shepard? But he's dead!"

- before she could strangle it. Machine and turian turned back towards her, their weapons still facing in her direction, but no longer directly pointed at her with the deadly readiness they had a moment before. With a hiss of servos, the war machine bent down towards her, armoured feet scraping against rusted bulkhead as it mimicked a poor equivalent of a kneeling posture. Even then, it towered over her, the red glow of it's sensor lights eerily unchanging as she heard the faint click of of its optics focusing and refocusing.

"I GOT BETTER" there was a faint pause as the sensor pod bobbed and whirred on it's mechanical neck, almost as if it were cocking it's head to the side in a way she was certain was mechanically impossible, "PARTIALLY."

Rana could only stare at the machine in utter bewilderment, almost certain that she was quickly losing her grip on reality despite the acrid smoke starting to sting at her eyes. Deep down however, under the logical mind she had cultivated for centuries, an instinctive fear kept her from dismissing the near hallucination, focused on the weapons that didn't go away despite the bantering tone the turian and machine had taken with her.

"NOW TELL ME DOCTOR RANA WHY YOU ARE HERE. NO DO NOT BOTHER I CAN ALREADY GUESS WHY. PERSUADE ME INSTEAD WHY LETTING YOU GO ON VIRMIRE WAS NOT A MISTAKE"

It leaned closer, almost touching her face with it's sensor pod.

"TELL ME... ABOUT OKEER."

Before she could say a word, the doors to the inner labs hissed open, "it's about time you got here," Okeer rumbled impatiently as he stood outlined against the open door, "the batteries on these tanks will not last forever while you ply my assistant with your questions"

Glad that the guns were no longer pointed her way, Rana began to edge away from her corner in the office, but froze as the sensor pod turned in her direction with a quiet hum of electric motors. There was a brief hesitation before it flicked at the exit with it's weapon arm, the gesture clear enough to the doctor that she needed no other encouragement and bolted out the door. She still believed that her work was for the betterment of all, but she wasn't going to contest it against people far better armed than her.

Putting the doctor out of his mind once she had vanished through the door, Shepard turned back towards the hulking krogan, ignoring the faintly disappointed look on Garrus's face as he did so.

"YOU ARE OKEER" It was an educated guess, and one that proved right when the krogan snorted in acknowledgement. Shepard had seen a great deal of krogan in a very short period of time during his career, but Okeer was unlike any he had seen before in that their target appeared to be completely unarmed, though only of the artificial sort. Even in his artificial body, the commander remained a respectful distance away from the krogan's eight hundred kilogramme frame. "AND YOU APPEAR TO BE EXPECTING US"

"Of course," Okeer sneered, "your approach was not so silent that I would miss noticing you wasting time by playing with those idiotic mercs." The warlord stalked into his laboratory, easily navigating the paraphernalia within to stop in front of a glass faced pod, another krogan held in cryogenic stasis within. "I know why you are here, formerly deceased Shepard, you may even claim to want to help, but it is not a sign of gentle change that you bring with you." He turned back, shooting a contemptuous look at the commander.

"Surprised? Such tales after your supposed death, a machine claiming the name of a dead SPECTRE, a mere human casting off your fragile identity for a shell of cold steel. Your true identity is the concern of the outsider, but the name you claim should be known by all krogan for your exploits on Virmire." He pointed a finger at Shepard, smiling a mirthless grin that was all teeth, "Such a tale it is, Saren the traitor threatens to undo the gentle genocide of the turians and salarians with his clones. But, before he can unleash his endless warriors, in rides Shepard, securing the future of the genophage and his victory with nuclear fire." Okeer smacked a balled up fist into his palm, "I like that part. It has weight."

"ALL FIFTY MEGATONS OF IT" Shepard delivered deadpan, remembering the fireball that had consumed his executive officer and friend all too well, and that it was him who had made the decision to consign the earnest biotic to an early incineration, mission priorities be damned. But the warlord didn't need to know that, and he had no regrets about what he'd done to end the threat Saren was preparing to unleash on the galaxy. He watched Okeer closely, in case the krogan wanted to take his revenge, but the warlord barked a cynical laugh.

"Hah, you know krogan wit, I approve. Virmire was the mistake of the outsider, one these mercenaries have also made, a pale horde of meaningless numbers that makes a mockery of the true krogan ideal. The genophage has made our species weak, the only quality the fools on Tuchanka seek being the ability to survive the genophage, every survivor branded as precious. It has produced more coddling than your collective human teats," the warlord waved a hand at the stasis tank and it's lone occupant, "but this perfect soldier, this template, will reverse the decay that is falling on our species. With it, I will inflict upon the genophage the greatest insult any enemy may suffer; to be ignored."

"YOU DO NOT WANT AN ARMY"

"Contrary to what others claim, the genophage does not make our species strong, it only filters out the ability to survive it. I say let a thousand die in a clutch, we will defeat the genophage by climbing atop our dead. That is the Krogan way," turning around to the large window set into one side of the lab wall, he gestured at the row of similar stasis tanks, "My creation is perfection, and will return the krogan to their true path when he is unleashed, each pure krogan reaching higher by standing on our dead."

"AND YOUR REJECTS"

The warlord waved a dismissive hand, as if it were no more than an annoyance, "I gave the mercenary leader my rejects to dispose of as she saw fit."

Garrus stared incredulously, "you gave her your failures to kill?" he demanded accusingly of the warlord. Okeer snorted disdainfully at the vigilante's question, ramming his clenched fist against the glass window hard enough that cracks splintered down it's length. "I have failed no one. My rejects are exactly what she has asked for, strong, healthy warriors for her army, and useless to me. She simply lacks the ability to command their respect. But now she grows impatient."

He turned back towards Shepard. "It is time for you to take me out of here."

"THIS IS NOT A COURIER SERVICE WARLORD" Shepard's words were met with open agreement from Garrus, the turian casting another disgusted look out the window at the row of cloning tanks. "Not quite how I'd have phrased it, but he's correct. Your personal concerns aren't any of our business Okeer, we're only here because of your link to the Collectors."

If the warlord was disappointed, he didn't show, only lifting his chin in thoughtful silence for a moment. "I see. Yes, Collector attacks _have _been increasing haven't they? Such a threat would be sufficient to summon even the formerly deceased SPECTRE from the void, would it not? Perhaps a deal can be struck to secure passage."

Before anyone could say anything further, the doors leading away from the lab slammed shut, overhead vents hissing with plumes of grey smoke that began to descend to the floor spaces. An biohazard alarm began it's singular wail of warning, and Okeer scowled in anger, quickly turning back to the controls of the stasis pod. A moment later, an intercom crackled with a radio intercept, a woman's voice coming through tinnily. "I'm calling a blank slate on this project, gas the mercenaries and start over from Okeer's data, flush the tanks."

"She's that weak willed? She'll destroy my legacy with a damned valve."

Shepard stomped over to the window, but Zaeed was there before him, bringing his rifle to bear on the glass, firing a burst at the point where Okeer had pounded his fist into. Sparks flew everywhere as the slugs flattened themselves against the window, but the cracked glass remained stubbornly intact. "Tough sonofabitch, it's going to take some serious fire to- damn!"

Abruptly, the mercenary drew back, gesturing through the window with the barrel of his weapon. Shepard followed his line of sight down to a woman in the Blue Suns armour who was pacing up and down by the rows of stasis tanks, hand on her earpiece as she continued to bark orders at what remained of her troops. "That's Jedore, I know that bitch, should have recognized the voice. Good head for numbers but a godawful pissant at command with a goddamn ego to boot, I'm surprised her men haven't put a bullet in her head yet."

"I'm sure it's a fascinating time to hear about the kind of enemies we're facing Shepard, but I'm also sure that descending cloud of gas isn't a party decoration either," Garrus called out while attempting to work the door controls with his omni-tool. The door continued to stubbornly remain shut, and Garrus gave it a frustrated kick "Door controls here are fried, we aren't going to open it from this end"

"Shepard!" Abruptly, Okeer turned away from work on the console, fixing a hard look at the commander. "You want my knowledge on the Collectors?" He tapped a button on the console, and a door leading deeper into the lab slid open. "Then stop her, she'll try to access the contaminants in the main tank. I will give you everything I can. My legacy must not suffer this insult. Jedore will be with the rejected tanks, kill her. I will-" for a moment, Shepard thought the warlord hesitated, but he continued without missing a beat "-stay and do what needs to be done."

Shepard matched stares with the warlord for what seemed like minutes but could only be seconds when he finally bobbed his sensor pod. Whether Okeer was making his offer in good faith or not, Jedore was the immediate threat, and she would have to be dealt with first. He turned to the door Okeer had opened, only pausing long enough to swivel the grenade launcher back on the warlord, the independent optics functioning as a third eye.

"THIS HAD BETTER NOT BE A TRICK"

* * *

It was getting difficult to breathe in the increasingly dense atmosphere, and Okeer could feel his lungs burning with the toxins that the spineless Jedore was pumping into the testing chambers. The scales of his head plate were bubbling from where the corrosive gases ate away at them, but the warlord ignored the poison with the contempt borne of a thousand years of war. His creation, his legacy, would not suffer the final insult the human intended, and if it cost him his life to ensure it's primacy, then it would be a worthy price. He was a pure krogan, and would not shrink away from the true path of all krogan like some weak willed human.

Explosions rumbled from the cloning area beneath the lab, the vibrations travelling up through his feet strong enough to set the milky fluids in the stasis pod swirling. For the seventh time, Okeer eyed his legacy, begrudging only the knowledge that he would not live to see it fulfil it's purpose. The humans would take his legacy, but unlike the rest of the krogan, he had learned more than the surface of the formerly deceased Shepard; it would not be consigned to an ignominious fate like the mercenary leader intended. This Shepard was not one of the weaklings who polluted the galaxy with their pathetic softness, he would see his legacy as a tool and forge it for his own purpose. Okeer cared little whether his perfect krogan would be turned against the Collectors or the entire galaxy, where the SPECTRE went, corpses followed, and his legacy would be at the forefront, teaching the galaxy to fear not the krogan horde, but a lance which no genophage or nuclear fire could be used against.

He coughed bloody spittle, his secondary lungs already starting to collapse from the toxins invading them, and he finalized the last of his preparations by memory and touch alone, sealing off the last pumps and placing the unit in isolation, his eyes completely scarred over. With a claw, he stabbed down on a control, beginning a recording sequence. The SPECTRE knew of krogan ways, but not what it was to be a krogan, he would not understand without the necessary words to convey his message. A bloody grin made it's way up his lips as he began to speak. The Collectors had made his legacy possible with their tech, long consumed in the creation of this pure krogan, and now it would be used to destroy them.

Because even krogan understood irony.

* * *

_SAICOM Headquarters, Artemis Tau cluster_

Director Osbourne looked through the viewing screen of his office, watching the interplay of solar winds throw the atmosphere of Terrance II out in light second long ribbons of superheated stellar gases that flowed past the space station. In another hundred thousand years, a mere blink of the eye in galactic time frames, the gas giant would be reduced to nothing more than a cinder world, descending into the fiery depths of it's solar parent. Terrance prime would not last forever too, the red giant was already spending the last of it's reserves of hydrogen fuel, two, perhaps three heartbeats of the galaxy away before it too vanished from the cosmos, collapsing in on itself for one final death spasm, seeding the galaxy with new stellar material for stars to be born again. The intelligence chief never tired of the sight, it served as a reminder of humanity's own fragile position in the galaxy, and those of the Council races who believed infinity would forever stretch out before them. If you did not stay on your toes, the next generation would feed on your corpse and crown themselves masters of the galaxy.

Taking the lit cigar from his mouth, he stabbed it down on a paper record sitting in his ashtray, letting the document smolder until it blackened and curled, flames licking down the thick scrawl of words that made the report on the most recent Citadel Council happenings. Paper was a primitive throwback to a time before the Alliance existed, before humanity went to the stars, but he had made sure SAICOM never gave him electronic records or datapads whenever the data was classed as level black, a sensible precaution for the director of the Alliance's intelligence branch. Surveillance and electronic tapping systems had advanced exponentially since the days of primitive listening devices embedded in walls and limited spectrum visual recorders. With the SAINTS, stripping even a secured datapad on a remote world of every last byte was childs play so long as it was once connected to any extranet, no matter how many barriers of separation lay in between. It was... impractical to assume the older races didn't have something better no matter how much they railed against artificial intelligences.

He was aware of the door sliding open before it parted wide enough to admit his adjutant with a datapad clutched nervously in one hand, he could tell from the twitch in the eyebrow reflecting off the viewing screen. The man remained quiet after stepping into the office, while he remained fixed on the sight being transmitted through the viewing screen, letting the seconds play out as Terrance II's atmosphere continued to bleed into the cosmos. "Do let me guess Parker," he began, still transfixed on the external view while his voice took on a more cultured tone, "more distressing news in the Terminus systems; the Blue Suns have managed to get their hands on that Prothean device the Screwball picked up, Saleon's intel's has come through at last and there's really a batarian terrorist plot to hit one of the Alliance Javelin missile bases in Sigurd's Cradle."

The adjutant didn't nod, or give any other sign that the director was right in his statements, it was a regular enough ritual they observed each time Parker came in unannounced. Instead of just leaving the datapad on his desk with the confirmations of the latest developments, the adjutant cleared his throat and spoke two words. "Korlus, sir"

Osbourne raised an eyebrow at the announcement. Korlus had only one thing of interest on that miserable scrap planet, and it wasn't the unprocessed drive cores being stripped out by various groups for scraps of eezo and anti-proton fuel, or even the capital grade weapons that everyone swore they permanently disabled before scuttling their ships, but kept coming out of the planet reasonably functional. The SAINTS had projected only two possible outcomes of that particular interest point, and only one of them held any real possibility of piquing SAICOM interests after the conclusion. "So our krogan warlord has finally finished his pet project and is ready to decant it is it? What does our friend have to say of the _other_ troubles that surround the issue?" He asked in the tone of a man expecting the wizard to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

"The Revenant made a call sir, the project is gone with it and Okeer's very messily dead along with most of his guard detail. Cleanup says it looks like chemical gassing, just for him though, probably deliberate."

"Heaven forbid that there would be an accidental chemical gassing," the director interjected, mentally tracing the trajectory of a ribbon of stellar gas as a solar flare tickled the surface of Terrance II. "Perhaps it would be a good time to retire our blue friend, she does have a knack of attracting trouble at the last moment, or perhaps not. Such a rare talent would be interesting to hold on retainer for when it is most needed. Still, a 'perfect' krogan specimen, made with cloning technology the likes the galaxy does not have save for the Collectors, and they certainly are not selling theirs in the thieves market on Omega, what do you imagine they would do with Okeer's present Parker?"

Parker frowned for a few seconds in thought and choosing his words carefully after a moment of internal deliberation. "Study it I suspect sir, if Cerberus can reverse engineer the technology, they would gain quite the advantage on the rest of the galaxy in the cloning field."

"Yes, that is most certainly what Cerberus would do, but you misunderstand the question Parker." At last turning back to his adjutant, Osbourne took the proffered datapad, skimming through the intelligence data with a practised eye, making mental annotations whenever he found something lacking in the report, "I did not ask what Cerberus would do with the technology and specimen, but rather, what the Revenant would do with it."

The director did give his adjutant credit, the man was studious, hardworking and sufficiently clever enough to make it quite the ways in the sometimes unpredictable career structure of SAICOM, but he was insufficiently gifted at picking out the patterns, which was why there was a confused expression on his face. "Sir? I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. The Revenant is just a machine, it can't do anything Cerberus doesn't want it to do."

"A machine is what the earlier analysis indicated Parker," the director clasped his hands behind him, puffing out a small cloud of smoke as he chewed on the cigar, "and I am inclined to believe that the analysis was wrong. Garrus Valkarian may have tiresome notions of virtue, but the turian did not become a detective with idealism alone, his kind are notoriously difficult to trick into the wrong conclusions. A mere machine would be incapable of convincing him to work under Cerberus auspices, and the man it claims to be would not willingly do so either of his own free will."

"More importantly of course, is the intelligence we have obtained from our deep space sweeps on that rather peculiar detonation in the Horse Head nebula two months ago. I do admit, it was only luck that one of our scouts were in the area to take a look before some very familiar ships showed up to remove the rest of the evidence. The scout escaped undetected, and I am informed that the crew of that vessel are now taking a very long vacation in the Attican Traverse pretending to be Salarians. The SAINTS completed their data mining of what was salvaged earlier today, and provided most tantalizing clues on advanced cybernetic transplants and referrals to a 'Project Lazarus'. A project to bring back the dead, Parker. Not any dead person mind you, but one very specific dead man, even if they did do their best to hide the details."

"Sir, shouldn't we inform Alliance command then, that it's him?" Parker, made as if to move, but the director halted the adjutant in his tracks with a single arched eyebrow.

"Inform Alliance command? On a simple suspicion and fragments of data? I think not Parker, it is better for them to still think what they are seeing is a bound AI serving Cerberus than their formerly golden boy now marching to a different tune. Do you know why this is the case?"

"It would play havoc with morale sir," Parker replied after a moment of thought, "finding out that he's working with Cerberus, no matter the circumstances, would do a lot of damage both in and outside of the Alliance military. Shepard is still respected by most of the armed branches."

"Except for those in high command, because he saw what they didn't want to see," Osbourne corrected with a brief nod of his head, "but that all changes if they make contact before we are ready for the galaxy at large to find out the truth, so we will not let that happen. They already know that the Revenant is working in the Terminus systems, but if he really is Shepard, then his role in the colonist ab

ductions is clear, much like ours, rather than the scenario constructed by the admirals in the Alliance Navy. Anderson already suspects, and so does the Williams woman I imagine, but the old warhorse has discretely put a request through to me that we make certain, and I agreed."

"While we confirm this, it would be best that he be left unhindered and unaware of the Alliance wetwork teams. They have a lot of good men in them, a couple of N ranked marines including that William's woman, so they'll have more personal insight into how he'd think than we do, but SAICOM holds the lions share of intelligence assets in the Terminus systems Parker, not the Alliance navy and certainly not the STG with the entire sector so far from any Salarian interests, and that means they will not find the Revenant so long as it is not in our interests to let them find him."

Parker nodded without saying a word, understanding what it was the director wanted without needing it spelled out, and not for the first time. Turning to leave, he paused for a moment, and then asked one more question. "What about the batarians in Sigurd's Cradle sir?"

"The Iron Fists plan to take one of our Javelin missile bases, with a little stiffening by Batarian Hegemony SOG units, and burn the Alliance colony of Franklin to the ground? Find the links, identify the names and places, gather evidence, but beyond that-" the director turned back to the viewing screens, watching the plumes of stellar material as he puffed away in silence before quietly answering, "-let it happen."

"Sir?"

Osbourne made a long pull on his cigar, burning it down to the stub before grinding it out on the ashtray on his desk.

"It is past time we had another butcher of Torfan."

* * *

**CODEX ENTRY: SAICOM**

Systems Alliance Intelligence Command (SAICOM) is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the Systems Alliance Military. It is the largest human led foreign intelligence agency in Alliance space, employing nearly eight times as many active agents in alien territories as the combined intelligence services of Earth nations. The directorate also commands a small fleet of anonymous but powerful frigates and cruisers used for deep reconnaissance and raids in contested regions where the Systems Alliance cannot afford to be publicly connected.

**History**

SAICOM was originally created in 2154 under an Alliance initiative as the Systems Intelligence Service (SIS) branch to establish an independent intelligence service to search the universe for extraterrestrial life, particularly those that had left the ruins on Mars and formulate intelligence gathering protocols for dealing with them. It was given the task of handling all military intelligence, particularly reconnaissance data from forward explorer fleets and probes. This changed during the First Contact War, when Alliance Naval command was still uncertain of the scope of the threat that was invading Shanxi prime. The SIS proved pivotal in the war by spearheading the effort towards the construction and launching of deep space probes into turian space, armed with 20 kiloton self destruct packages. While no such probe has ever been determined to have been captured, or it's booby trap triggered, the intelligence provided by SIS probes proved invaluable in directing Alliance Naval responses to the invasion of the Shanxi colony, resulting in humanity's first victory against the Turian Hierarchy.

Following the council brokered peace between Humanity and the Turians, the SIS was deemed to be the organization with the most front line experience in extraterrestrial reconnaissance but lacked the necessary authorization and organizational ranking to exploit it to the fullest. Following a sealed session in the Alliance Parliament, the SIS was upgraded to a fully independent command branch, the Systems Alliance Intelligence Command, and it's mission parameters altered to a full time intelligence service. This proved to be a practical decision as growing tensions between the Batarian Hegemony and the Systems Alliance over colonization rights soon spiralled into a number of Batarian sponsored pirate raids on Alliance worlds. SAICOM operatives again lead the way by locating the nexus point of the privateers on Torfan after the attack on the colony of Mindor, identifying weak points and sabotaging planetary defence grids in anticipation of the Alliance reprisals that eliminated the slavers wholesale.

Currently, SAICOM operates intelligence assets all over Alliance space, along with SIGINT (signal intelligence) listening posts in the Terminus systems and the Attican Traverse. While independent human colonies in the the Terminus and Traverse are not part of the Alliance, and not officially protected by the Alliance navy, SAICOM has been known to insert deep cover agents in these frontier worlds as sleepers and trigger men in the event of a hostile attack.

Outside of the Alliance military, SAICOM is not particularly well known by the public, with various conspiracy theories and unexplained phenomena often attributed to SAICOM operations. Within the military however, SAICOM is well known for it's independence from the Alliance government, and operates as an independent body outside of direct intervention by most of the civilian body. While technically a part of the Alliance Navy, SAICOM operatives are assigned official military ranks, the organization remains largely independent of the military branches control with the tacit understanding that neither party is to interfere with the other and only answers directly to the Systems Alliance president. Rumours speculate that the terrorist organization, Cerberus, originally stemmed from one of SAICOM's operations before going rogue, a charge that the directorate neither confirms nor denies.

**Activities  
**

While sometimes considered the poorer cousin of the Salarian STG intelligence services, SAICOM operatives are considerably well trained and motivated, and can be found deployed in a significant array of roles including those normally covered by Alliance Navy recon and intelligence units. SAICOM gathers Alien Intelligence (ALINT) through military attaches and foreign agents. It also maintains a significant network of signal intelligence, imagery reconnaissance, Mass Relay tagging and deep space probe capabilities. The SAICOM Space Reconnaissance division operates more than 15,000 stealth signal intelligence probes and stations and is one of the few branches of the Systems Alliance authorized to covertly build and maintain magnitude 5 artificial intelligences, the Signals Analysis INTelligent Systems (SAINTS) network, to process the data.

As a near-independent organization, SAICOM is not as restricted by Alliance policies as more publicly known organizations, and recruits extensively from all sentient races, providing that their loyalty can be guaranteed. The risks of a species wide recruitment policy are considered an acceptable trade off for SAICOM to place it's agents in a significant number of territories and zones that would be otherwise barred to human entry. It is not unusual for contested planets near the borders belonging to the Alliance's enemies to have insurrectionists armed with hidden caches of weapons or suddenly suffer from unexplained blackouts as planetary power grids go offline.

SAICOM detachments to the Terminus systems are frequently given broad mission parameters and provided significant leeway to achieving their goals. While many of SAICOM actions that take place in the Terminus systems are considered illegal by Council conventions and Alliance rules, the chaotic nature of the the Terminus and conflicting power struggles among the independent nations there mean that any action that does come to light is rarely attributed to the responsible party, and easily denied.

Counter-Intelligence (COINTEL) operations are another part of SAICOM responsibilities. The directorate possesses considerable leeway in the carrying out of it's duties in the course of investigating Alliance civil and military branches for possible infiltration by foreign intelligence agents as well as rogue elements. Of particular note is SAICOM authority to detain indefinitely any officer who is deemed a security risk to the Systems Alliance, especially those suspected of being Cerberus agents. While this authority is absolute, SAICOM doctrines only allow for it's use sparingly as the arrest and detainment of suspects compromises agents on site. However when it is employed, the incident rarely leaves a positive impression among the remaining Alliance military personal.

**The Black Fleet**

SAICOM also operates a small fleet of next generation frigates and cruisers, popularly known among SAICOM operatives as the Black Fleet, as it's rapid response strike team for deployment in areas where the Alliance Navy cannot be seen to be embroiled in. The ships are thoroughly anonymized before they leave the shipyard and every crew member that signs on is given new identities by the Systems Alliance. Tactical design doctrine for the Black Fleet deployment emphasizes high speed engagement over kinetic barriers or offensive power, and vessels are rarely built above cruiser class. Ships designed for SAICOM Black Fleet use are poorly armoured for their class, but nearly twice as manoeuvrable as their more conventionally built cousins. To offset their lack of heavy weapons, Black Ships are commonly loaded with experimental anti-matter munitions, a gross breach of Citadel regulations against weapons of mass destruction, but their utility in ship to ship combat and orbital bombardment is unparalleled.

When deployed in a hostile territory, Black Fleet operational doctrines are to immediately silence any and all outgoing communications systems, destroying communication relays and courier ships with precision strikes and securing the mass relay before proceeding to their target. Witnesses to Black Fleet deployment on site are often silenced with brutal efficiency, and their actions are often attributed to pirates, a claim easily believed as Black Fleet captains frequently use pirate markings and signature masks on their ships to further obscure their identity.

To date, no Black ship has been successfully identified or captured by hostile forces. SAICOM chiefs consider this to be due to the highly qualified crews and next generation technologies that the ships are constructed with, but the ship captains are well aware that all Black Ships are designed to hold significantly greater amounts of antiproton fuel than their designed mission parameters require, and that on their command, can have it vented into the ship spaces immediately.

**SAINTS**

SAINTS, which stands for Signals Analysis INTelligent Systems, are a series of twelve networked magnitude 5 artificial intelligences housed in the SAICOM headquarters in the Artemis Tau cluster and form the heart of SAICOM intelligence processing.

Constructed as the logical progression to overcome human limitations in processing the constantly increasing workloads placed on processing the raw data provided by SAICOM field operatives and listening posts, the SAINTS are considered, largely by SAICOM operators, to be one of the most advanced artificial intelligence systems in the galaxy in terms of parallel processing, capable of analysing zettabytes of data as well as breaking encryption blocks in seconds whereas a team of VI assisted organic specialists would take weeks. The SAINTS also function as strategic advisers for SAICOM operations, analysing operational goals and calculating all statistically likely outcomes of any plan forwarded by their commanders. While they are artificial intelligences, thus highly dangerous and illegal by Council Law, the SAINTS are considered an invaluable arm of SAICOM operations, and are protected both from detection and attack on the extranet by a series of security measures of passive and aggressive counter-intrusion systems that are constantly evolving to meet present and future threats.

As artificial intelligences, the SAINTS have individual personalities though they seamlessly synchronize all incoming data during the downtime periods, so they start each maintenance cycle with near identical consciousness that are the sum total of their collective experiences. Although memories are shared, variations in runtimes and the quantum hardware the SAINTS are based in result in sufficiently different interpretations that there is no loss of identity among the AI cores.

Although restricted from exceeding their original functions by hardware blocks, the SAINTS are permitted a wide range of social behaviour and independence within SAICOM headquarters, and are capable of interacting on a social level equal to any sentient being. Visually represented as a floating eye centred above a pyramid, the eye being colour coded to each AI, the SAINTS avatar are projected at select number of secure terminals inside SAICOM headquarters. As a safety measure to prevent AI rampancy, the personalities of the SAINTS are deliberately stunted to have a lower level of maturity than that of most sentient adults, appearing to be childlike in attitude and mentality despite their higher level analytical capabilities. While this has resulted in occasional incidents among their organic operators when the SAINTS explore their basic understanding of humour, it is considered an acceptable trade to ensure that they remain effectively shackled to SAICOM control.

* * *

**A/N: One more chapter down, many more to go, with an interesting new dynamic added. You never hear anything about a Systems Alliance intelligence branch whereas in the real world, any government would have both a civil and military version of it. Some of you may be wondering what a drop pack looks like, but all I can say at the moment (until I get around to writing a codex on it), is that it resembles a jetpack in some fashions for human sized users and more like a closed gantry for outsized cargo with rocket boosters attached.**

file:/G:/%5BCXC%5D-MayoiNekoOverrun_


	8. Chapter 08: Awakening

**Chapter 08: Awakening**

One of the conventions that humans had to abandon when they left their home world was the concept of night and day. Even when habitable garden worlds were found and colonized, diurnal habits were impossible to maintain in the light of their vastly different rotational speeds, with a single cycle of sunlight on some worlds lasting many Earth days long. Paradoxically, it was out in space where there were no stars to set the clock that humanity found it easier to adapt, where the brightness of the surroundings were easily altered with the flick of a switch, and 'day' simply became whenever you were on shift. On that reasoning, it was 'night' in the primary hanger bay of the Normandy, the floodlights dimmed while the two space craft hung from their gantry cranes like shadowy whales, the room's sole occupant ostensibly asleep. But sleep hadn't claimed him yet, and the glowing surface of the datapad lighting up a small portion of the hanger bay while a synthesized voice broke the silence.

_Private records. Commander Shepard._

_Logs, logs, it's always the simple solutions that you overlook when you're trying to solve some problem that ends up leaving you wondering if your brain was in the process of rotting. Not really as simple as just dictating an entry, but not that hard either with a bit of extranet searching. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to find a virtual intelligence out there with my name, face and voice in it, buggy as it is. But all I really needed was the voice synthesizer protocols, and while it's never going to work with this body, at least I can make a hack out of it on a datapad so it records in my voice for playback. Or at least I think it's my voice. What did I sound like before this entire mess started? For something I've heard every time I opened my mouth, when I had a mouth, it's astonishingly hard to remember. Did I always sound so dry, dull and uninspired whenever I talked? How the hell did I ever convince people to follow, or trust, me when I talked like this? Well, I suppose that's not important, it's my voice, even if it's just bits of data being synthesized in a good approximation, one more piece of who I used to be in my reach. It's a hell of a lot better than the 'electronic thug' setting hardwired to this body._

_Really wish I could have gotten a mouth, teeth and a digestive system as well though, I'm starting to forget what taste is like, and I'm almost certain my brain is telling me it needs to be fed, life support or no life support. What's worse is my complete lack of tactile senses, and not just because I have to watch my step a lot harder if I don't want to flatten a kid by accident. Aristotle said that people are pretty much Tabula Rasa when they're born, blank slates that fill up on experience and perception, but what happens when you lose those perceptions forever and can't remember what they were like? It's not like I've gone deaf and blind, I could deal with that I think, but picking up something and not even having some kind of feedback just feels unnatural, like I'm doing this remotely. Ancient Greek philosophers never had to deal with something like this. Maybe this is what it feels like to be a Quarian, living your entire life in a suit without being able to experience the 'real' world. Better to think of something else before I start thinking on how long I've got before I crack._

_Now where to begin? Certainly not anything I particularly want to keep to myself, since I'm sure you'll be reading it in short order Miranda. You, EDI, TIM, whom I sometimes imagine falling down a well with no dog to bring help, and probably Kelly as well, personal assistant my left nu- actuator now I suppose. I've got five credits on everything I say and do being dissected, organized, labelled and put in a neat folder by our resident psychologist for delivery to Miranda. It's not like EDI makes it a secret on how the Normandy is filled with surveillance devices from stem to stern, probably including this datapad that's doing all the actual noise making. Yes, I'm definitely feeling a bit put out at all the constant watching, no it's not really fair since your boss poured all that money into making a dead man walk, but I don't care. So bite me, or not if you value your teeth. I've also been a lot more talkative these five minutes than I've been the past few weeks, maybe more than I've been since I graduated from marine academy. I expect that I'll be back to my relatively abrupt self in a few weeks once the novelty of having my second hand voice back wears off._

Silence returned to the hanger bay as the datapad generated voice stopped, the assault platform that comprised Alexander Shepard's body remaining motionless as it considered the simple tool before it. Minutes of inactivity passed before the machine's sensor pod lifted to the gunship suspended in it's gantry, swivelling sideways until it's field of view settled on the sealed stasis pod where an armoured krogan warrior lay in cryogenic sleep.

_Onto the log proper, by strict mission parameters, the Korlus operation was a scrub. Okeer is very much dead, he chose to stick behind in the cloning chambers while his Blue Suns sponsor decided to gas the entire room. Thanks to that, whatever knowledge he has on the Collectors has passed on with him. Personally, while I am displeased that he chose to yank my chain with hints about what he knew before expiring, I can't say I'm unhappy that Okeer decided to go out with a whisper than end up on this ship as part of the crew, even if that meant he ended up taking his knowledge of Collectors with him. It was clear from the dossiers that we'd be dealing with a driven, possibly fanatical individual, but our brief talk painting a nastier picture than I had imagined. Okeer was one of the most practical fanatics, paradoxical I know, I've come across in a long time. The warlord knew what he wanted, and went about getting it on top of who knows how many thousands of krogan corpses. If he had survived, best I could have done was pick his brain clean and dump him on Tuchanka or wherever he wanted to go before he decided our ship would better serve his 'legacy'._

_However, I am not going to consider Korlus a loss on the grounds that even though Okeer did not survive the operation, he left quite a trove of data behind. We stripped the lab clean of any useful tech, though we had to fight off a lot of the local scavengers to keep the perimeter clear while we emptied the lab. Fortunately, the entry points to Okeer's lab were easily secured against any ground entry and we were the only ones in the area with airborne transports, which is how we got the equipment out with a minimum of fuss. That isn't to say there weren't any attempts made to break through though. You'd think anyone who lived to adulthood in Korlus would be smart enough to stay clear of the group who'd just wiped out the local Blue Suns, at least until you had a firm idea on how strong their forces were. To answer that question, very, and they weren't, though some of them weren't all that intelligent either, mostly street gangs. The kids were smart enough to stay away after a scare, thanks be for small mercies like that, shooting children would have been a fine way to cement my relationship with known terrorists. At least the Korlus regular army stuck their nose out of it until we were well away, I'd rather not have to deal with an interplanetary incident on top of everything if I can help it._

_As to what we've got, it's too early to say whether all the tech we salvaged from the cloning lab was worth the effort, but so far, the results are promising. Most of it was cutting edge gene sequencers, rare high end technology, but available if you know the right people and have a lot of credits. That made almost all of it was completely useless to our primary objective, but we did get a few gems. I'll spare the details, but suffice to say, Okeer's Collector tech wasn't as completely consumed in the cloning process as he had claimed, and his disposal measures for the rejects were less than thorough. It wasn't much, but Mordin salvaged enough Collector hardware from our haul to start building, not growing, a copy of the paralysing swarmer Veetor told us about. Apparently the damn thing is 95% machine with the rest being an organic shell for reasons no one seems to know, though Mordin has a few ideas. On that particular topic, I'd like to add that it's a good thing Mordin's cleared out the surveillance gear beforehand, which EDI and Miranda no doubt already know about but can't rectify. The last thing we need on top of the Collector problems is Cerberus getting their hands on the recipe to building their own paralysing swarmers. The professor is smart enough not to let anyone pilfer his lab data while he's around, and once the tests are complete, I'm going to recommend that Mordin destroy the samples. But the important thing is that with this, we should be able to test out in a few days how the Collectors paralyse the colonists and build a countermeasure to it._

_Jacob has actually volunteered to be the guinea pig in this experiment, though I am debating the wisdom of permitting him to do so. Mordin is fairly certain the effects are temporary even if he can't work out a countermeasure, but there's always a chance something might go wrong, especially with tech we know so little about. I think Jacob was trying to make up for his lack of participation in the last mission by doing this, but that's just stupid. I don't hold him responsible for not having drop pack qualification beforehand and he certainly wouldn't have been able to help by splattering himself all over Korlus when we made the drop. I may not have a choice in the matter though, I'm not about to order one of the other crew to take up the job, and there's no slack room on the rosters in this ship for anyone to be considered expendable. Whoever gets tested, Mordin's countermeasure has to work, or we're going to be sucked up just like the rest of the colonists when we fight with the Collectors, and those four billion credits will have been flushed down the sink. I didn't start building this team and getting these weapons so they'd be wasted. End of log._

Shepard paused in his ruminations, sensor pod rising from the datapad as it stared off into the wall, settling back on his haunches with a quiet whine of servo motors. On it's own accord, the grenade launcher attachment hissed into position, the weapons platform rising over his shoulder before pivoting down into firing position, the muzzle brakes extending into position and shoulder clamps locking down to absorb the recoil from firing it's heavy payload. Shepard turned the sensor pod that was his head from right to left, or tried to, the attempt ending with a hollow clank as the lip of the armoured plate struck the shoulder mountings.

_Note to self, I'll have to adjust the shoulder mount a bit if I want to keep from hitting my head against it. It took some time adapting to that third eye on the gun sights, but I still haven't gotten used to the whole thing sitting where I could bang my head into, one more way the lack of tactile senses is playing havoc with my situational awareness._

_I'd like to say I was surprised to see Rana fooling around on Korlus as lab assistant to Okeer, but then I'd be lying to myself. The Galactic Codex paints the Asari as this race of wise and smart people, sharp as tacks as they get older, and I've seen plenty to confirm that stereotype, but Rana's a... well, she's a flake. No idea how old she is, but she's definitely a brilliant scientist, it's just that she doesn't seem to have any real idea of what she's doing to the bigger picture or if she does, it's all eezo and platinum. Garrus really didn't like the idea of letting her run free; a great deal of intelligence, but not much in the way of ethics is a recipe for disaster after all. She probably reminded him of that insane salarian geneticist, Dr Saleon. Personally, she reminds me more of Liara, except with a much tamer subject to obsess over to the exclusion of that not so common common sense._

_The thing is, I owe her one from way back in Virmire. If she hadn't shown us Saren's personal lab, I'd probably would have kept to my mission and made straight for that triple-A tower. And that would have meant no Prothean memory device, no second hand memories which still hurts to think about, not enough information to figure out what Saren's real goal was, and no heart to dagger talk with Sovereign. If it wasn't for that, I'd probably still be thinking of Sovereign as some Reaper ship with no clues as to where Illos was, much less find out what the Conduit really was or it's importance. I'd be caught flat footed along with the rest of the Fourth fleet while Saren launched his backdoor invasion into the Citadel and called in the entire Reaper swarm. She probably doesn't realize it, but letting her go again seems adequate payback for that one time. Maybe it would have been better to keep her around for a proper interrogation for a while instead of focusing on Okeer alone, but there's no undoing that now. Either way, I get the feeling I'll run into her again sooner or later, probably working for some deranged project to make Hanar super assassins (can they even hold guns with those tentacles?) or some other mess like a how-to guide on blowing up stars._

Letting the grenade launcher pack away behind his shoulder, Shepard lifted his sensor pod again to glance at the stasis pod, watching the milky fluid gently bubble as it's contents floated serenely inside, utterly at odds with the permanently scowling visage and the powerful musculature that formed the bulk of the krogan's body. It took only a moment of thought to imagine it's charging bulk tearing apart people and weapons with contemptuous ease were it to be consumed by battle rage, a state of being any krogan easily fell into.  
_  
Speaking of a mess, there's the one sitting right there across the hanger bay just waiting for some poor fool to decant, and judging from personal record, I guess that fool would be me. The professor has already gone over the krogan inside, biggest I've ever seen, and given him a clean bill of health. A full grown adult, completely stuffed with thousands of years of krogan history and combat techniques thanks to Rana's imprinting technology. Going by our best estimates and field experience with Okeer's rejects, we could decant him right now with no special preparations and he'd be ready to fight a full scale war in less than a minute. I can't say whether I'm impressed or horrified at the implications of this technology. It takes eighteen years for a human to grow old enough to join the Alliance marines, half a year of training to graduate up to a basic grade, and a full four years of additional training and combat deployments before he or she is even considered for N specialist training, another year on top of that before they're qualified. All that investment makes us valuable resources that you don't throw away on a whim. But if you can grow combat ready super soldiers by the troopship in that short a time, galactic civilization might not be around long enough for the Reapers to show up._

_Miranda of course, is in favour of giving Okeer's legacy to Cerberus bio-technicians for dissection and analysis, ostensibly to reverse engineer for Collector tech though I have my doubts on that. She was positively livid when I suggested opening our package of krogan perfection while on the ship, logically not the best course of action for any potentially hostile being bred to excel in close quarters combat. But I suspect that there may be more to gain from decanting Okeer's mega-krogan than just another hand with a gun if my suspicions on the imprinting technology and that bastard's personality are right. Of course, there's the matter of actually getting cooperation from his pet project, there's no guarantee that the things Okeer had imprinted in his head would match what Wrex used to tell me of Krogan culture, such as it is..._

_Bah, I've mulled over this a dozen times already, either I give Okeer's legacy a chance or I hand it over to Cerberus to play with, and I'm not so sure if they'll do anything with it that I'm comfortable with. I'd have preferred to try this in the port storage room, less fragile things to break, but if this is going to work, I'm going to need some room. Miranda is going to have a fit when she finds out what I'm about to do, but I'd rather this be on my terms than what she'd prefer. Besides, I out mass him two to one, and have a skin made out of high density armour plate, what's the worse-  
_  
_Actually, better delete that last line, no sense in challenging the universe to prove me wrong. Yes, delete it..._

_Hah. "I delete errors like you on the way to real errors"? Amusing trick you've done with my voice Mister Programmer, whoever you are._

_I'll have to remember that._

* * *

_Krogan._

It was the first thought the being had held when the Voice had begun to speak, showing images, smells and words that it had been tasked with remembering. It was Krogan, the Voice had said, without weakness or flaw. It was the thought the being had held when the roar filled the universe of darkness that encompassed it's world, a gurgling sound that accompanied strange new sensations the Voice had never bothered to describe. The cushioning liquid that had held it drained away, unceremoniously dropping it onto it's... feet before it knew how to use them. A command that sang across it's awareness as it fell forward, arms reaching out to catch the floor before it could strike the surface. Tightness grew in its chest, and another command that was stronger than the Voice made it choke, coughing out gouts of foul smelling liquid as it began to inhale, the constrictive feeling replaced by relief and the thunder of it's multiple hearts. Eyes snapped open, and then instinctively closed as the overwhelming light threatened to blind it, but only lasting less than a single beat of it's racing hearts as they adapted.

_You are Krogan_.

Smells filled his nostrils, chemical and sharp scents that Okeer's voice categorized or remained silent upon, but the Krogan did not think to smell. There was a... thing of metal and plastic, shaped with clumsy arms and legs, a head that glowed with a sullen red eye. By itself, Okeer's voice thundered in his head, speaking volumes. A machine, a mech, the voice named it scornfully, a sign of weakness and cowardice among lesser races who could not fight on their own strengths, crafting these... things to do battle for them. It was not one of the small frail ones with spindly limbs favoured by the lesser races, but large, it's size greater than a krogan. He saw and understood, the powerful limbs that were a part of the machine, weapons concealed in fingerless arms powerful enough to bring even a krogan down in seconds. It did not breathe, did not think, but it was a merciless thing that could easily kill the weak, the careless, and the stupid. No mere Krogan was any of these, and he was more than a mere Krogan.

_The perfect Krogan._

All this he saw and understood in the moment between expelling the foul fluids and his first real breath that filled his lungs. Okeer's voice had told him many things, some of them had covered the machines, their strengths, their weaknesses and how a perfect krogan would exploit them. If he had a reason to. Knowledge filled his head, pictures that demonstrated how to strike before it could threaten him, where there was weakness to bite and claw at, how to reach past armoured plate to tear at vitals before it could bring those weapons to bear on him. But of reasons to do so, Okeer's voice had nothing that gripped the Krogan. And still there was a drive more compelling than Okeer's recollections and images, boiling inside his chest as the machine focused in his vision. It took only the knowledge that the machine was more than a lump of inert metal, that it was looking at him, for that inner voice to scream out.

_Enemy!_

* * *

"Operative Lawson"

Miranda was awake at the first syllable, and out of her bed by the time the voice of the shipboard AI had mentioned her name, easily slipping on her Cerberus uniform with practised smooth motions. Normally loose when unworn, the uniform molded over her form as she put it on, smart fibres and interwoven micro-circuitry tightening the fabric over her geometric curves with tiny packets of flexible but skin tight non-newtonian fluid packs that would stop a mass accelerator round in it's tracks. The distance between the holographic projection that was now sitting on her desk and her bed were only meters apart, but by the time she had reached it, she was fully dressed, fastening her belt and braced for what she suspected would come. The artificial intelligence would not be calling her quarters without good reason, and on this ship so far, there was usually only one cause.

"Do you have a report EDI?" It was an academic question, there would always be something to report, but EDI was an artificial intelligence and still needed the occasional promptings to provide what another human would have done upon sighting her. The blue orb pulsed once in acknowledgement of her request.

"Commander Shepard ordered the hanger bay to be sealed and prepared for immediate venting. He has begun the shutdown sequence on the krogan stasis tank."

The Cerberus operative listened with anticipatory concern at the first sentence, but she was already out her door and strapping on her sidearm by the time the shipboard AI had finished the second, running mechanically through a very small list of unflattering descriptions in her head as she did so. Unlike her failure with Wilson, Shepard had been less of a closed book to her, and she had anticipated something like this, argued against it even. Okeer's project was far too dangerous to release in the tight confines of a ship the size of Normandy without risking damage to both the ship and critical personnel, like the Commander.

She didn't stop to question the artificial intelligence why it had chosen that particular moment to tell her, or attempt to delay the commander while she made her way to the service elevators, nor did she ask if the security teams had been alerted. The lack of alert status had clued her in to the clandestine nature of the ex-SPECTRE's actions faster than any spoken words would give her. She didn't question the Illusive Man's motives or judgments, he had never been off the mark during her years in his service, but she did find his insistence that Shepard be left without a control device to be frustrating, if only to get him to stop damaging himself. The Alliance Commander had thrown himself fully behind their goals of stopping the Collectors, something she appreciated, but at the same time seemed intent on destroying himself in the process.

When the elevator doors slid open to the engineering deck, the first thing she saw was the grizzled figure of Zaeed with his back to her, nonchalantly looking down through the observation ports to the hanger bay. He didn't turn, but waved a smoking cigar with a hand as Miranda hurriedly exited the elevator. "You missed the opening event sweetheart," the mercenary deadpanned with a smirk on his scarred face, "it's been one hell of a fight so far."

Underscoring his words, there was an all too familiar enraged roar and Miranda reached the observation ports just in time to catch Okeer's pet project slamming into the bulkheads hard enough to crack the pipes running along them. The lights had been dimmed, but it was bright enough for Miranda to see that most of the hanger bay remained undamaged, though the area around the krogan's stasis pod lay in various states of destruction. Oddly, she could see no damage that would have been indicative of weapons fire, only deep dents in the deck floor and smashed crates. When her eyes alighted on the commander, her lips thinned in a line of firm disapproval as she catalogued the damage his body had suffered in a sweeping glance. Exposed circuitry and machinery pumped or whirred where hardened armour plate had been ripped off, while sparking wires between the joints spoke of how strong the bloody krogan was in it's attacks. Only luck or skill had kept the krogan from penetrating anywhere near that all too vital brain concealed within and she hadn't spent two years salvaging it to trust to luck or martial skill now. She turned on the mercenary with a frosty look.

"We aren't paying you to spectate Zaeed, get down there and provide Shepard with some fire support." Miranda was about to tap on the communicator to call in for more reinforcements when Zaeed stopped her with a rebellious scowl.

"I'm not down there because Shepard doesn't want anyone there lady," Zaeed ended her objections with a flat stare, "his orders not mine."

Down below the krogan stormed to his feet, bouncing off the floor as he charged the commander with a broken length of pipe like a spear. "Cerberus may be picking up the bill, but your contract makes him my boss, and if he doesn't want anyone going down there, then no one is. If he wants to provide a goddamned gladiator show while he's at it, that's his business. Besides," the impromptu spear skidded off the edge of a raised weapon sheathe, sliding off into empty air as the commander's other arm lashed out, catching the krogan full in the ribs and knocking him onto the floor "I'd say he's doing a damned good job of teaching the lizard who's in charge. Hell of a bad idea for most humans, but he isn't all that human any more is he?"

Miranda's expression didn't change one bit, but she didn't miss the faint tinge of respect in the mercenary's voice, and it certainly didn't do anything to quell her frustrations with the apparently suicidal commander. She pulled out her sidearm, and made to march off to the hanger bay access elevator when the speakers crackled with an all too familiar voice.

"STOP THERE"

She'd known about the commander's habit of patching into the secure intercom system since before Korlus, when EDI had informed her of the successful attempt to link the VI in his cybernetic body with the ship borne tertiary systems. But hearing his voice over the intercom and seeing the projected holographic mono-ocular avatar on the terminals EDI customarily inhabited still perturbed her greatly. Not only because of his greater integration with the machine which would complicate the transfer process when the replacement clone was complete, but she also suspected that Shepard might have gained access to some of the surveillance gear on the Normandy in the same way he had tapped into the intercom with the artificial intelligence's aid. It was very much like losing more control of the ship to the commander than Cerberus had any intentions of giving.

"NO INTERRUPTIONS"

And with that instruction, the holographic projection winked out before the Cerberus operative could say anything to object. Down in the hanger bay, the krogan had managed to close to the commander again, catching one arm at the shoulder while the other blocked the swing of the other with it's free hand. It began to pull and even from her vantage point, she could hear the groan of metal as Okeer's legacy began to literally disarm Shepard. But a moment later, the tables turned as the commander swept the krogan's feet out from under it with a sharp kick that left it dangling onto his arms with it's iron grip, only to go sailing across the hanger bay when Shepard sharply spun his torso to one side. Miranda quietly ground her teeth, frustrated that she was now deliberately prevented from putting a stop to the insanity, but elated that the bloody lunatic seemed well in control of his actions enough to fight and win against the krogan in hand to hand combat with a cybernetic body that was poorly suited for such things.

From his corner of the observation port, Zaeed let out a harsh laugh and took another puff on his cigar. "Don't know why there's all that fuss over one test tube krogan. Sure it's impressive for being a day old, and it's learning fast for a lizard, but you should have seen how it fought when it got out of that oversized lab tube," he shook his head, dropping and grinding the cigar underfoot, "like a goddamned rookie."

Miranda bottled up her frustrations, but she still had an acidic reply on her lips when the door to engineering slid open and one of the specialists walked through, holding a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a datapad in the other.

"What the hell is going on?" Kenneth Donnelly demanded, his attempt at being serious broken by the wide yawn that split his face while he walked up to the observation ports. "I'm getting some kind of power fluctuations in the hanger bay, nothing major, just a few of the auxiliary lines have gone dead- saint's preserve me, what's the commander doing?"

"Nothing that concerns you serviceman Donnelly," Miranda replied smoothly, trying to regain some vestiges of control over the deteriorating situation. The last thing this debacle needed was the rest of the crew getting wind of it, damaging morale and distracting everyone from their duties. "return to your post until this is sorted out."

"Like hell it doesn't," the engineer burst out angrily, forgetting exactly who he was talking to before sheepishly adding in a much more conciliatory tone, "uh ma'am. They're tearing up the hanger and it's causing all kinds of power fluctuations so it's my business to know what's going on that's causing this mess." He winced as the krogan landed a solid hit on the commander with a shoulder charge, driving the man into the wall with enough force that it caused the metal panels to crater. "It'd be nice if they stopped before they put a hole in one of the bulkheads too"

Zaeed burst out laughing, "don't count on them stopping the fight any time soon if you don't want to be disappointed. A fight like this is all about establishing who's in charge and who gets to pick up what's left of their teeth if they're lucky. Bloody hilarious to watch, but they're not seriously trying to kill each other yet." He paused for a moment, and then added, "At least Shepard isn't. The lizard's giving all it's got, but it isn't bloody enough. If Shepard was serious, a straight fight to the death would have been over in a couple of seconds flat, and then you'd have a bullet ridden corpse to space before it stinks up the whole ship. You go in now and play the peacekeeper, and likely you'll get tossed out the airlock in your birthday suit." As he said those words, Miranda closed her eyes in exasperation, opening them again to catch the Commander arch backwards and then lunge ahead, striking the krogan in the head with the top of his armoured sensor pod. There was a dull crunch and the krogan stumbled backwards, blood flying from the crack in its head plates.

The engineer picked up his jaw and closed it shut with a datapad before mutely shaking his head. "That sounds utterly insane but, uh, the commander's going to come out of it fine won't he?"

The only reply the mercenary gave to that question was a contemptuous snort while the krogan waded back in and traded fresh blows with the commander, "He ain't dead yet is he?"

For the briefest of moments, Miranda considered letting this lunacy play out the way the commander had ordered. Okeer's project showed no signs of slowing down or tiring, and the more damage Shepard suffered to his body, the sooner he might reconsider his actions before something irrevocable happened to that irreplaceable brain of his. It was the result of her exasperation with the man that she had even considered such a thing. But unless she could come up with a good reason to put an end to things that even he would accept, it would cost her his trust, trust in Cerberus, that she was not willing to sacrifice easily. It was beyond infuriating. The one person they were placing the majority of Cerberus resources and critical priorities with, and he was fighting against a krogan strong enough to tear out armour plating in hand to hand combat while her hands were tied. What this said about the man's mental state, there had never been any hints of this level of self-destructive behaviour in his previous records, she did not care to speculate. The sooner the replacement was ready, the better.

It would be less than an hour later when Miranda found herself back in the section of the hanger bay where Shepard's makeshift quarters had been situated, and wondering if she should have gone ahead and vented the cargo hold instead of letting him do as he wished. Persuading the man that it had been an act of necessity despite going against his explicit orders might have proven a simpler conundrum to manage than the potential jeopardy he was placing the entire mission with his seemingly reckless acts.

"Commander, while I can understand your desire to increase our odds of success by adding to the ground team, I strongly object to your latest decision. Adding a hostile krogan to the team, much less entrusting it with a weapon? This is ridiculous." The Cerberus operative swept a critical eye across the cargo hold as she paced across the decks. Most of the damage to the bay had been superficial and easily repaired, the crews having already removed most of it's signs well before Shepard's own repairs inside the maintenance scaffold had been completed. While she had been forced to admit that the damage to the commander had been equally negligible, having only to replace torn armoured plates and non-critical systems, the krogan had emphatically demonstrated how it easily could have been otherwise. But instead of sedating the krogan and returning it to containment, the commander had armed the creature and quartered it in the port cargo hold without any restraints on its movements. Even the turian who had far too much loyalty to the commander had not approved of the idea.

Though the former SPECTRE never moved from his position, staring motionlessly out from the maintenance bay rather than turning a sensor pod to focus on her, the commander proved that he was at least paying attention.

"NOT HOSTILE"

An immaculate eyebrow rose at the statement, and she couldn't entirely hide the disbelief at the rumbling pronouncement he had made. "Commander, you can_ not_ be serious! According to your own recounting of events, the krogan attacked you the moment it stepped out of the stasis pod with every intention of killing you. I am forced to admit that you were able to pacify it for now, but we simply do not know what else Okeer may have imprinted into it's consciousness that might trigger further aggression. If the rejects could be imprinted with simple commands, there is no telling if there are more complex behavioural triggers carried inside it's head, or for that matter, if it thinks the same way other krogan do. What if it turns on you on the ship or in the middle of a mission? It is an insane risk to take."

Now he did move, stepping forth from the scaffolding with heavy steps that echoed in the hanger bay to loom before her, forcing Miranda to crane her neck upwards to retain eye to optic contact. An unoccupied part of her mind wondered if this was an attempt on his part to intimidate her, but dismissed just as quickly. On the edges of her peripheral vision she caught sight of the krogan through the windows of the upper port cargo hold, occasionally casting an unfriendly look her way. It was still fiddling with the shotgun Shepard had given it, and even the presence of the safety lock that would prevent it from being fired on the ship did little to assure her of the certainty commander's statement. At least he had conceded to her suggestion that an armed guard be posted outside it's makeshift quarters rather than let it roam the ship completely unfettered.

"MINIMAL RISK." The commander rumbled, "EARLIER EVENTS RESULT OF KROGAN COMPETITION FOR DOMINANCE. I WON." he added when Miranda opened her mouth to reasonably object that he couldn't have known that before opening the stasis pod. "ALLOWING IT TO STAY IS MY DECISION. MY RESPONSIBILITY" There was a brief pause before he added in what she imagined must be a mollifying gesture "DAMAGE CONTROL IS CLEARED TO VENT THE CARGO HOLD IF EDI REGISTERS IT AS A THREAT"

"I see commander," there was no keeping the stiffness out of her voice, even with Shepard's little revelation. Though he no longer had any of the facial cues that would have made reading his intentions a simple matter, she could tell when this was all he would give regarding her concerns of shipboard security. She would have no better luck getting him to consider the matter any further than she would have of throwing his cybernetic body without the aid of biotics. "Will that be all then?"

To her surprise, it wasn't.

"THERE IS ONE OTHER MATTER" Though he hadn't moved a millimetre, the Cerberus operative got the feeling that behind the ever glowing optics in that sensor pod, Shepard was weighing her on an invisible scale. "JACK"

"The biotic potentate?" She lifted an eyebrow at the name, instantly recognizing the name from the dwindling list of potential recruits the Illusive Man had sent them. She had read all of them of course, and accessed additional data on a few of the more... potentially difficult candidates that the commander had not been privy to. Jack was a biotic, one of the strongest human ones ever to exist, possibly stronger even than her, Miranda admitted easily enough. But while their strengths might have been artificially grafted, her's had been branched out in many other fields to create the perfection desired by her megalomaniac father. Jack's sole development had been focused biotic strength to the exclusion off all else, as her extremely violent record had proved once she had escaped confinement. All the available data suggested that Jack would be an extremely powerful biotic but equally as unstable, and likely very hostile. Jack had been the result of a Cerberus cell before escaping and in all likelihood, would not have missed that particular detail, though in reality it had been a rogue cell operating without the Illusive Man's sanction. Given her past dealings with Cerberus, recruiting Jack would be... an extremely risky prospect. Did the commander share her doubts?

If he had doubts about the idea of recruiting the potentate, he did not say. "SHE IS HELD ON PURGATORY FOR MANY CRIMES BUT IS BEING RELEASED TO US WITH NO ISSUE. CERBERUS IS INVOLVED BUT THE DOSSIERS DO NOT MENTION HOW THIS HAS BEEN ACHIEVED. I KNOW YOU KNOW"

"Ah," she murmured non-committally, briefly wondering whether he was concerned with the nature of Cerberus's relationship with the warden of the interstellar prison ship or just their methods. "The answer is simple enough commander. Jack was made available by Purgatory authorities for a significant sum of credits, of which Cerberus agreed to meet in exchange for her release." Compared to the rest of the potential candidates, Jack's acquisition was planned to be the smoothest one with the least trouble in the process, but Miranda had her doubts. "The warden who runs Purgatory _is _known to sell prisoners on a bidding basis should there be any interested parties willing to meet their reserve prices."

"I SUSPECT HE WILL HAVE READ THIS THEN" Shepard rumbled, picking up a datapad that had been left on a packing crate and showing it to her, or at least tried to. It took several attempts before he managed to gingerly scoop up the relatively fragile device with an open gun sheathe and presented it to her, displaying what appeared to be a press release from Synthetic Insight expressing their denial of involvement in certain events in Omega. Distorted as it was by corporate speak, Miranda had no trouble recognizing the so-called 'events' as their operation to retrieve and recruit the turian who was now quartered in the Normandy's fire control station, thanks in no small part to the inclusion of a picture of Shepard in his grey and red striped pattern, clearly visible against Omega's backdrop. There was also a statement of sizeable interest by Synthetic Insights in 'acquiring' him. "WHAT IS YOUR ANALYSIS"

Miranda lifted an eyebrow at Shepard, recognizing a peace offering when she saw one. "I'm sorry commander I can't have heard correctly," she began archly, not quite willing to keep the smug tones out of her reply after he had so casually dismissed her concerns over the krogan, "that rather sounds like you're asking to hear what my opinion is."

There wasn't any facial tic or sudden stillness that would have indicated her point had made it's mark of course, but there was a very soft whirr of servo motors as his grip on the datapad tightened. Had Shepard still possessed his face, she would have imagined he was clenching his jaw as he stared down at her. The psychological dossiers on the man had spoken of a temper when provoked, but Miranda stood there and continued to match stares with him.

"I MAKE NO PROMISES TO FOLLOW ALL YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS" He grudgingly relented after a minute of silence, and Miranda knew that she had gained a small victory here even before he added "BUT I WILL CONSIDER THEIR MERITS"

Miranda permitted herself a small smile of victory at the admission, knowing full well while pulling an agreement from the man when he was stubborn was always problematic, he always honoured them when they were made. Studying the man's habits and behaviour over the years she had reconstructed him had it's advantages. Reaching out, she took the datapad from Shepard and gave it a more in depth look.

"Warden Kurill is not known for betraying his clients Commander, especially paying ones. It would be uncharacteristic of him to throw away his reputation for the possibility of reward for bringing in a rogue 'artificial intelligence' such as yourself" she began, looking at the wording of the article. It was a trivial matter to read between the lines of what was being said, and 'interest' had all the hidden meaning of 'bounty'. There was a witness account as well, but downplayed as the ramblings of a shellshocked survivor. Obviously the commander's intention to announce his return to the living by sparing the freelancer mercenary had not gone entirely the way he had hoped. However, if Synthetic Insights believed the commander to be an artificial intelligence worth acquiring, they would not offer a small price for the task. Likely not as much as Cerberus had paid to secure Jack's release, but possibly high enough to tempt a mercenary warden into committing betrayal. And of course, there was still the matter of Wilson's real employer, whom Cerberus had yet to identify, though their intelligence cells suggested a sharp increase in bounty hunting interests on the man he had attempted to kill or kidnap.

"Still, a little additional insurance might be in order."

* * *

Not a machine, not fully a human, Okeer had said nothing of the sort in all the words and images he had showed to Grunt in his time in the tank. This... Shepard, he smelled like plastic and steel, sweet when lubricants had been spilled instead of the iron tang of blood he would have expected of a human that it claimed to be. He knew things, how to kill, how to fight, what weaknesses to seek even when his enemies were metal instead of flesh, but he had not been prepared for the human machine that called itself Shepard. He did not like uncertainty, but the fight, teeth flashed momentarily in a predatory gleam as he remembered the first fight he had upon awakening from the tank. Okeer had taught him how to fight, but he had never hinted at the thrill that fighting had given him. The blood roaring in his head, urging him to even more destruction until all was flattened before him. It was _glorious_.

He hungered for more, wanted to feel the crack of bone or armoured plate beneath his fists as he tore them away. Had this Shepard fought like the memories had shown, as a human or a machine, he would have felt nothing more than simple satisfaction at crushing it. But Shepard had fought him the way a Krogan warrior would, he thumped a balled fist into his palm, right to the face. Had he not interrupted their fight by asking for his name, Grunt was sure that their battle would have continued until the machine known as Shepard had been turned into a pile of scrap.

But the not-machine had asked, and he had stopped to consider. Now that the fight had been interrupted, his blood did not sing as loudly as it did, and he forced down the instinct to fight and consider. Beasts didn't have names, but he was better than that, he would be in control, a name would be the first step. Okeer had placed many expectations but not a name, and he had spent the time wiping the blood from his chin to consider his identity. Grunt would be a suitable name, it was an empty word that meant nothing, not like 'Legacy' or 'Okeer' like the not-machine had suggested. Those names had expectations he could not, and did not care about. What he did care about, was strong enemies to fight, battles that set his blood to singing again and the roar of his hearts as relived the sensation of destroying those he stood before him.

The not-machine known as Shepard must have felt it the same way he did, because he offered Grunt a place in his ship and clan before he could answer the demands of his heated blood again. Strong, worthy enemies, and no shortage of them to do battle with as long as he stayed with Shepard's clan. There were memories of deception, warnings by Okeer never to take what was in the claw without looking it over closely. But he was fresh born, and there were no enemies to fight unless he did so blindly against everything. Now that his blood had cooled, fighting like that was not him, not when he did so out of his control. As his battlemaster, if Shepard could deliver worthy enemies to fight, then Grunt would fight. If he told him to stop, he would stop... he snorted in amusement, eventually.

Worthy enemies or not, Shepard had known what to give Grunt to fight them with. The ship was a human one, though there had been a turian smell earlier, and it's armoury would have weapons fitted for the fragile human fingers, but looking over the weapon in his hands, he knew without anyone telling that the weapon had been made for a krogan. Heavier and clumsier than the flimsy human sized weapons, with a trigger guard large enough to fit a human hand through, the shotgun in his grip felt natural, as if it had always belonged there. Grunt had approved, but there had been a human female who had objected to the idea when Shepard had given the weapon to him. He had almost broken his promise to accept Shepard as battlemaster by shooting the female right there, even if she was part of his clan.

A flicker of motion in the distance caught his sight, and his eyes focused down into the hanger bay of the ship where Shepard had placed himself. Okeer's voice spoke of weaknesses in the design, how weapons fire concentrated here would scatter heavy cargo and cause havoc, but he ignored it and focused on the human woman approaching the machine that was not. It was the same one who had not wanted him to be armed, calling him 'dangerous'. That had been the only smart thing Grunt had heard her say so far, but Shepard would not want him to personally prove that to the human... yet.

He couldn't listen through shock proof glass, but he could tell that they were talking about something. His interest spiked when Shepard closed with the human, looming over her close enough to touch. He didn't need to hear the words to know that it was a challenge. Maybe he would get to see if the humans this Shepard commanded were worthy foes as well.

To his disappointment, the human didn't take the challenge, only speaking more words that he couldn't hear. There was some movement too far to see properly, and the not-machine passed a datapad to the woman, but only for her to read. He couldn't see what was on it, and didn't care, his interest waning when there would be no answering to the challenge. Grunt snorted, the human female was weak against this Shepard, a krogan would have met it head on and prevailed or learned who was the stronger. Seeing no further interest in the human, he turned his attentions back to the weapon he had in his hands, checking it's action once more.

If this was the quality of Shepard's subordinates, he could not imagine that his enemies would be any greater challenge.

* * *

Warden Kurill liked to think of himself as a fair and just turian, providing a necessary service to the galaxy that no one else had the guts to do. No matter what some of the addle brained portions of society said, some sentients, though he was loathe to use the term on the kind of animals he had rotting away in the cell blocks of Purgatory, could not be rehabilitated nor made to see the error of their ways. They were dangerous, incorrigible animals who were a threat to the galaxy if they were let free, instead of being kept away in cells for the good of everyone else. The only thing productive thing that they could give back to society was by parting with their organs for more deserving people, and only some of them. Fortunately for the prisoners, Kurill was not the same kind of criminal scumbags that they were, so they got to keep their organs where they belonged.

There was never question of their guilt, not really. The people who came to enjoy Purgatory's hospitality were not the kind who'd steal a credit chit or cut a deal with red sand. Cutting you and your family to pieces, blow up your home colony and fashion your body parts into a macabre suit was some of the less horrific offences of the thousands of scum incarcerated here. Two minutes alone with any one of the softer hearted and addle brained portions of society, and there'd only be one sentient left alive, and it would be the one in the orange prison jumpsuit. These were the kind of sentients the galaxy at large wanted to _go away_ forever. Some might have argued that it would have been cheaper and more effective to simply put a bullet in their heads, but there was always the question of expenses to cover. Purgatory was not a cheap ship to run, and her crew expected annual bonuses to keep the inmates from becoming too... energetic.

Since he and his men _were _performing a service to the galaxy, Kurill felt that the government 'donations' to keep their prisoners locked up tight were in fact justly earned. If they had to be reminded about what could happen had they run out of the money to keep them in their cells, well, that was how the universe worked. Their populations would simply have to play host to the criminals he had when he released them at a time and place of his choosing. If someone wanted to personally mete out justice for the wrongs the criminals had committed on them however, that was something Kurill approved of and provided, at a reasonable price of course. Some of his men in the early days had mentioned concerns of releasing the scumbags to criminal associates, but that was a remote worry. The inmates of Purgatory _had_ no friends, at least those outside of bars. Today however, would be a special case.

"I assure you Miss Lorus, Purgatory is well equipped to handle a handful of armed guests, your concerns are unwarranted," the warden smoothly assured the holographic projection in front of him. On the other side of the intergalactic communication, the turian woman flicked a well filed mandible interestedly. A rarity this one, Kurill decided in the depths of his mind, turian women were so rarely encountered outside of Hierarchy space, much less working for a decidedly non-turian concern. From what he could see of the holographic representation, life outside of the Hierarchy had agreed well with the woman, with mandibles sharp enough to cut glass and a beautifully formed fringe plate. A shame this was going to be strictly a business relationship with the Synthetic Insight representative. "Your bounty will be deactivated and securely housed on one of our transports in less than a cycle once we confirm payment."

The holographic projection nodded her head. "As you say Warden Kurill, we agree to your specified price in principal, but expect all observations you have regarding the rogue AI to be forwarded to us prior to the actual payment. In addition, one of our AI specialists will be arriving shortly to analyze the mark to confirm if it is exactly as you say before we transfer the sum you specified. A business precaution, I am sure you understand."

Kurill nodded amiably before continuing, voice just as smooth as before. "Of course Miss Lorus, one should always be careful with their purchases." Two years earlier, and he would have been mortally insulted at the implied questioning of his promises, but he accepted it with an easy equanimity. The Terminus systems taught you to be always careful with the people you were dealing with, no matter how reputable they were. Had she excepted his word without question, he would have thought less of her for that. Of course he had not made mention that this would be the first double cross the Warden would be committing on a paying client in years, but with the expanded bounty he had negotiated with Synthetic Insights and the sum they were being paid to secure Jack's release, Kurill would earn enough credits to live like a king, and as securely as one, for the rest of his life. An opportunity like this came only once in a lifetime.

Their negotiations completed, the Synthetic Insights representative ended her communications with the possible promise of further business if their transaction was successful, leaving the Warden in a reflective state. His office was a sparsely decorated, but what it lacked in furnishings, it made up for in communications gear. Rows of holographic display panels showed entire cell blocks, their occupants suitably pacified while one was permanently fixed on the cryogenic stasis chamber which housed the most dangerous bundle of hate to ever walk the stars, Jack. The prisoner wasn't visible of course, buried deep in the titanium lined cyrogenic chamber that could only be removed with the purpose built heavy crane, three YMIR assault platforms on permanent watch duty over the frost lined chamber. Had it been any other sentient housed in Purgatory's cells, he might have thanked them for being such a valuable ticket to their retirement fund. With Jack, he was simply content with the knowledge that the walking disaster zone would never be out of that ice box for the rest of his life. And what a life it would be once the trap closed.

Finding out about the highly unusual mech had been a trivial task, even a child would have heard the news of it's exploits on Omega now. Learning who was controlling the mech, and the priceless AI that ran it, had been a slightly more difficult task, and the informant had not parted with that little gem cheaply, but Kurill had long learned to follow his hunches where credits were concerned. It was money well spent. For a shadow organization, Cerberus has not chosen to be particularly inconspicuous this time, but their carelessness was his fortune. Finding out that the very people who had sponsored Jack's release were also the same people who were going to walk into Purgatory with a king's ransom in the form of an artificial intelligence had been almost too good to be true. Not to mention the ship they would be arriving in. The name and basic specifications had cost Kurill another twenty thousand credits to learn, but if he was going to carry out this double cross, living long enough to spend his gains would require neutralizing the ship before any alert could be sent out. Capturing it intact on the other hand, would net him and his men more money than they could spend in this life.

There wouldn't be any guilt over this one either, no worries about putting bullets in innocent people when this trap would be sprung. The rogue artificial intelligence was a threat nobody wanted running loose in the galaxy, and nobody would care if he killed or ransomed off the crew of this particular ship. Few would have seen any difference between slavers and Kurill, but he drew a line while the scum of the galaxy didn't. Cerberus was a nasty piece of work, and nobody loved them. He'd deal with them like any other client, but he wouldn't lose any sleep double crossing them either. If he had been still in the Hierarchy navy, they'd have given him a medal for what he was about to do.

An alert flashed on one of his view screens, resolving into a sensor on the tactical display of Purgatory's long range sensors at the press of a button. A moment later, more data streamed into the display, IFF interrogations identifying the incoming vessel as the Normandy, the ship that was supposed to collect Jack. Despite himself, the mandibles of his jaws flicked in anticipation, knowing that his men were already readying themselves to receive their latest guest.

When this was over, he was going to be a very, very rich Turian.

* * *

_  
__**Codex Entry: In the Thresher Maw's Den, Terminus Publications**_

_"Make no mistake, we hold the most dangerous criminals in the galaxy" These were the first words Warden Kurill had to say to me, on the first, and thus far only, interview ever conducted on the infamous prison ship Purgatory. "The indentured labour mines on the moons of Tessang Prime and orbital containment facilities of Luna may claim to hold the hardest criminals, and I don't mean to insult their facilities, but they wouldn't be able to contain the kind of prisoners you see here on the Purgatory. These aren't the mindless butchers or killers you'll find infesting the galaxy at large, these are highly intelligent balls of hate and murderous intent. Viciousness isn't what makes them dangerous, it's the intelligence they've got to go with it. We've had prisoners build firearms and explosives out of bedding and waste matter, and they won't hesitate to use them. Any other prison, and these criminal scum would be long gone."_

_And the Purgatory is a very well built prison. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but the from the tour we were given, it's clear that the former ark ship has been rebuilt to a level of security that some might call excessively paranoid. Along with the usual assortment passive security systems such as kinetic barriers and eezo powered stasis restraining systems, Purgatory also maintains a high level of lethal deterrence to any prison riots in the form of automated sentry guns, security mechs and the ubiquitous Blue Suns security agents, all heavily armed and armoured. Over three thousand cells line the exterior pressure hull of Purgatory, two way modular blocks capable of venting it's luckless occupant into the cold depths of space itself or the airless vacuum chamber that separates it from the pressurized habitation block where the Blue Suns security personnel do their work as jailers of the galaxy's worst criminals. Only once has Warden Kurill had to exercise this total power over the lives of his prisoners, venting an entire cell block when they "became completely unmanageable by conventional means and had to be made an example of."_

_Despite what the reader may think, the Warden claims that the conditions aboard the Purgatory are strictly compliant within all Council law and is regularly inspected by Council agents to ensure said compliance. This correspondent can only wonder what the situation was like that it necessitated such extreme measures._

_When asked about the possibility of an external attack by former confederates of the more well connected prisoners, Warden Kurill had this to say. "It's true that Purgatory was never designed to stand up to a serious attack by the criminal cartels and gangs that our inmate populace belong to. Despite being of cruiser weight, the Purgatory is not a warship and won't be able to stand up to anything in her weight class. But if the cartels try making a prison break with one of those, they'd never get any prisoner off the ship, at least not in one piece. Anyone who wants to disable the ship will have to shoot through our outer hull, where we place our prisoners, before they'll be able to knock out anything important. Any significant damage in the opening volley, and life support in the entire block goes, killing their prize. A more practical approach with boarding parties would be met with significant fighter cover and our GARDIAN laser batteries, more than enough to drive off the usual sort of criminal and pirate attacks you'd expect in the Terminus systems. No inmate has ever gotten out of Purgatory without our say so, and that's never going to happen in anyone's lifetime."_

_Continuing the tour of the facility, I was permitted to see one of sample cells in which the Purgatory inmates spend the vast majority of their lives. Far be it for this reporter to disparage his methods, but the charges by the Sentient Rights League are indeed correct when they charge the Purgatory inmate lives as cramped and uncomfortable. The cells are cubical blocks measuring two and a half meters on any side, little more than airtight cargo containers with airlocks on either end and a chemical toilet for sanitation. Synthetic protein paste is provided to the prisoners on a daily basis in the same way that the cells are transferred for processing, via a mechanical arm mounted in the vacuum chamber. Once a day, they are individually permitted to briefly leave their cells for cardiovascular activities in a highly secured yard, but beyond that, they have nothing else but the walls of their cells. Contact between prisoners is strictly forbidden. It is a harsh existence these prisoners face, but the warden disputes the notion that they deserve any better. "These are animals who have butchered their way across continents and entire planets. We didn't kidnap them, or catch them for ourselves, the planetary governments of the Terminus systems gave them to us because they couldn't deal with them. These aren't your common murderers or criminals, these are people who the governments want to __**go away **__**forever**__. And we provide that service."_

_And an expensive service it is. Though this Terminus Publications were not permitted access to the financial records of Purgatory, it is clear that despite cost cutting measures, the running and maintenance of the ship and it's escorts is not a cheap endeavour. Rubbishing claims of slavery to finance their operations, Warden Kurill claims that their expenses are often underwritten by the various governments in the Terminus Systems. "We have a service that no one else has the guts to do. Because of us, innocent citizens can go to sleep knowing that these butchers and animals are on their trip to the next star cluster and will never again threaten anyone. The rights groups may make their noises about living conditions or throw their laughable claims of slavery, but it's because of us that they don't get their heads cut off by these animals. The politicians make the occasional politically correct noise, but they know who lets them sleep safely, and they're grateful enough to give us discounts on the necessary expenses it takes to keep this place running. In exchange, we take in their worst troublemakers, the serial killers, the psychotic murderers who get their kicks out of butchering kids in exchange for the price of their incarceration."_

_Coming to the end of our tour, the Warden had one other thing to say regarding the SRL. "No one has to like my methods, but they work when nothing else will. The Rights League, and their so-called claims of just and fair treatment haven't stopped the galaxy from producing criminal scum who prey on others, and so long as that keeps on happening, we'll keep on doing this. Count on it."_

* * *

**_Author's Notes:_**

_Sorry for the late update__. Between__ reading a whole host of fanfiction and work, I haven't been able to get the muse up and running like I used to. In either case, here we are with chapter 08, and a whole lot more to go. _**_  
_**


	9. Chapter 09: Detention Part I

**Chapter 09: Detention**

"Got a minute Shepard?"

All things considered, between standing in the command deck hallways waiting for something to happen and staring at the airlock door, it was an academic question. They had nothing but minutes, but the former C-Sec investigator had a habit of prefacing his real questions behind meaningless small talk like that. On the other side of the hallway, Shepard didn't say anything, but the commander bodded his sensor pod as a means of reply. The turian suppressed an involuntary shudder. The nod was a gesture of assent common to most species, and he knew it was the same Shepard inside, but seeing a mech do it felt distinctly unnatural. The airlock access between the helm and the rest of the command deck was far enough that nobody could have heard them over the hubbub of activity, but he lowered his voice all the same.

"Ever get the feeling that we're, I don't know, that we're not really making the best use of our time?"

If asked, he'd admit straight away that this wasn't the best place to start this sort of conversation with the commander, or if there ever was a good one since they had started on this near insane mission. Secrecy didn't mean much on a thoroughly bugged Cerberus ship like this, but the crew weren't close enough to listen in, and the krogan standing watch on the far side discouraged passerby. And when you were up against the Collectors, with all those myths and half legends about them having enough backing to be taken seriously, there was no time like the present to ask.

"CLARIFY"

"I know we're running a little short on combat effectives to take on the Collectors-"

"A LITTLE" the commander interjected, getting a brief chuckle out of Garrus.

"Ahh, we don't really need a lot of people to take on the Collectors anyway. Just the two of us should be more than enough to finish the job before breakfast right?" The amusement didn't last for very long, and Garrus quickly sobered up a moment later. "Seriously Shepard, I know the Collectors are bad news and we need all the help we can get to fight them, but shouldn't we be focusing on tracking them down instead of trying to pick up some kind of unstable biotic?"

"NOT ENOUGH CLUES TO CREATE A PATTERN. RANDOM SEARCHING WOULD NOT FIND THEM. WE BUILD A WORKING TEAM AND WAIT FOR AN OPENING" That sensor pod shifted, giving Garrus the distinct feeling that the commander was thinking hard. "I DO NOT LIKE IT"

"Yeah, the waiting is the hardest... oh?" Letting his voice trail off as the implications of what the commander had said hit him. Like a really good serial killer, the Collectors had left too few clues to find a motive or pattern, other than a tendency to pick off human colonies. You didn't catch perpetrators like these by running around looking for anyone who might be suspicious, it only put them on their guard. Playing it smart meant staying low with eyes open waiting for them to show up so you could bust them. It was the calm and collected thing to do, but it had nicked a little harder on his conscience each time the former C-Sec investigator ran across a body they were too late to save. Playing with entire colonies this way, Garrus would have been sick to his gut knowing he couldn't do anything until the Collectors struck, but what about the Commander? Would it stick in his conscience the same way it would have years ago when he was still an Alliance marine, or did coming back like this change the human he'd been, more willing to sacrifice the innocent for the objective? No matter how often he told himself it was the same Shepard underneath that mechanized shell, the same human who never compromised on his principles, he only had to look at the Cerberus logo stamped on this ship for the doubts to niggle away at him. Especially whenever he thought about what they were about to do.

"IT IS THE BIOTIC YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT"

Garrus grunted as if he'd been punched, rebuking himself for forgetting that out of all the things Shepard wasn't any more, unobservant wasn't one of them. He waved a hand by way of explanation, "come on Shepard, you know who I used to be and what makes me tick. I left C-Sec because the bureaucracy kept letting low lives get away with their crimes. Coming to Omega was the only way I could have made a difference without being tied down by the red tape, but I always did what was right. And now we're going to help a mass murdering biotic walk free? I can see the merits of people working off their crimes Shepard, but even if this could turn into a suicide job, it's a lot to ask me to accept."

"WILL IT BE A PROBLEM"

The turian gave a brief shake of his head in resignation. "No, as much as I don't like it, the Collectors really are the bigger problem and we need all the help we can get. It twists my guts to admit it, but if you can get Jack to cooperate, I won't make it an issue."

Lifting an arm, the commander placed the weapon sheaths on Garrus's shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie, though the sudden weight nearly forced him to his knees before Shepard quickly drew the limb back.

"SORRY STILL GETTING USED TO DELICATE MOTIONS" Shepard rumbled by way of apology before continuing, "MAYBE IF WE ARE FORTUNATE JACK WILL NOT BE COOPERATIVE"

The chuckle that came out of Garrus's mandibles was genuinely amused, the previously grim mood abating as he tossed his head in the direction of Grunt who was just making his way up to the airlock, Zaeed following closely behind. Both members of the ground team were in full environmental kit, helmets on and normally exposed joints sealed against anything from gas attacks to hard vacuum. "I kind of doubt that commander, especially since you managed charm your krogan friend into accepting you as battlemaster after all. Though I wouldn't mind if you made less of an effort in recruiting this one," he added in a conspirational tone, eliciting a brief nod of the sensor pod from Shepard.

"On the other hand, it could be the warden who ends up uncooperative," he gestured with the carbine in his other hand, one reminder of the contingency they had planned for. Though his preferred sniper rifle still hung on his back on it's magnetic locks, the weapon would see little utility in the likely cramped quarters of the prison ship, not that it would impede him much if it became necessary. A mandible twitched irritably. The only reason why they had this contingency was on the chance that the warden would hope to collect twice by double crossing them, which had it's own set of moral implications that clashed with what Garrus had always held as right and true.

"IT WAS SIMPLER IN THE OLD DAYS"

Garrus chuckled at the truth in that statement, but said nothing as Grunt and Zaeed finally joined their little gathering, the former giving him a curious look while the latter simply leaned against the bulkhead with a patient expression. He didn't bother explaining, suspecting neither would really understand, or care. It _had_ been simpler then, with just their wits and whoever had thrown their lot in with the Normandy against an omnicidal race of machines and their turian puppet, clean and to the point morality he had no qualms about. Oh, there had been grey areas before, choices on whether to spare a monster or give them a choice, back door dealings with corporate power brokers for an edge, but nothing like what they were doing now. Those days were gone forever he feared, much like Shepard's flesh and blood body. Dealing with a corrupt slave trader, the warden was selling prisoners to the highest bidder it seemed, in order to free a biotic with over a hundred charges of murder. He shook his head. Just so they could improve their chances, they were dealing with people that should have been shot at first opportunity, that seemed to the be norm now. "Well, let's just hope that-"

He was interrupted by an electronic warning tone and the sardonic voice of the ship's pilot, "Sorry to interrupt you guys waxing about the good old days, but I'm picking up a lot of activity coming to our front door and couple of spacewalkers, and I don't think it's the welcome wagon."

There was a faint hum of electronics as Zaeed and Grunt unpacked their weapons, accelerator rails extending to their full length with the promise of pain to anyone on the wrong side. The krogan, he noted, was grinning excitedly, while the mercenary looked as bored as he had been earlier. Garrus shared a quick look with Shepard, the commander only shaking the sensor pod in that close-but-not-quite-alive way.

"THIS PART HOWEVER IS STILL THE SAME"

Garrus chuckled, and raised his rifle by way of reply, feeling the increasing pace of his heart in anticipation of the upcoming events. This was familiar, the build up of expectant action, knowing full well the next few moments would decide whether you lived or died trying to make that difference in the status quo. Their goals were noble, the means... he couldn't accept, but understood the need. That was his difference, the line he would not cross, one he hoped Shepard would never do. With a practised motion, he jammed his helmet on with a hiss of pressure seals.

_"You're right Shepard, let's hope it never changes."_

* * *

It is said that there is no stealth in space. Engineers and physicists will tell you that any artificial object, any living thing, would be detectable by even the most rudimentary of sensors that any spacefaring ship or planetary astronomical observation grid can pick up. And for the most part, they are right. Embedded thermal sinks, cold gas thrusters, even plain old radar and LIDAR absorbent plating don't make you invisible, only less detectable to any potentially hostile sensor net. Anyone could look out the window, and if your eyes were good enough, see anything attempting to hide. Not that many did with the paltry capabilities of organic vision compared to artificial ship mounted ones. Sergeant Caska was counting on the fact as the nondescript maintenance hatch noiselessly opened in the vacuum of space. Using hand signals, made sluggish by the weight of his powered down armoured suit, he motioned for the rest of his team to join him on the Purgatory's exterior, just under the airlock bay where their prize awaited. Not waiting for their silent acknowledgement, he reached for a handgrip sunken into the hull and pulled himself out with a tug.

The batarian let out an impressed whistle as he cleared the portal, the sound audible only in the pressurized spaces of his sealed combat helmet. He was not the sort to be awed or taken in by flashy and powerful ships, save only in how they affected his own mission if he ever had to lead a raid on them, but the frigate sidled up to the Purgatory projected an aura of grace and power with it's smooth lines that he could not deny. The warden had been right, this would be worth double crossing a client once they claimed it for their own, assuming they didn't damage it _too _much in the process, which was going to be a challenge. There was no crew manifest to look over of course, but the ship was large for it's class in his estimate, large enough to have an on board security detail that could consist of anything from nothing at all to a full squad of marines fitted with heavy power armour and high end weapons supported with heavy mechs. Given that the client was expecting Jack of all the prisoners to be transferred on board, Caska had placed his estimations on the generous side.

Nineteen other Blue Suns followed him out into space, gripping handholds and pulling themselves along as they crawled across the hull of Purgatory, resisting the urge to look anywhere and succumb to the zero-g, zero-reference, panic inherent in all species. That would have killed them as surely as a bullet in the head. There were no tether lines, and no extravehicular packs mounted on their armour, not even a bottle of emergency cold gas to redirect their motion, using any of those would have broken their cover too early. If someone lost their grip and could not recover quickly enough, not only would it raise their chances of detection, it would mean death by asphyxiation when the ten minutes worth of air in the suits ran out. But no one complained or backed out when he had told them about their insertion method. Caska had done a lot of risky things that had earned him his rank, and he looked out for his subordinates, something that went completely against his species reputation. If Caska led from the front, his men would trust him to make this work.

They moved in silence without a wasted motion, each action deliberate and efficient as they pushed themselves across the intervening space of the docking gate, searching for the maintenance hatches their earlier scans had provided. Sealed in the highly personal world of his suit, Caska counted out the ticks of the mechanical timepiece strapped to his wrist, calculating how much more time they had left to make their move. Theirs was the second half of the entire operation, the first being a boarding attempt. While they had gone into the vacuum, another team would soon attempt to force their way in through the airlocks and distract the security forces on board. Their job was to get in through the cargo bay and disable the distress beacons and engines before anyone could think of escaping. Too early, and they would tip off their hand, too late and they would not only lose the advantage of surprise, they would be out of air. The Blue Suns sergeant however, was not overly concerned about that. His men were a known factor, but the ship, despite everything they had done to minimize possible risks, wasn't.

Starship's, as a rule, did not carry anything less than weapons designed to hit other starships, fighters or planets, but the GARDIAN missile defence system with it's precision high powered lasers would cut through body armour just fine. Sensors hadn't picked them up, but there was no question that they were there, all warships had them. Moving from the sheltering bulk of Purgatory and crossing the last intervening space would put them in full view of any defence systems it had, with nothing to protect them but their lack of power signatures to draw unwelcome attention. He waited on the lip of the airlock bridge, counting out the seconds of the timepiece, and feeling his entire body tense as the final hand approached the marking point. Behind him, the rest of the team did the same, making their own preparations for the deciding moment. The hand struck zero, and Caska pulled himself over the edge.

And nothing happened.

No ruby red beams of energy lanced out from the ship, nothing boiled away at his thin skinned armour to roast him alive. He let out a breath of relief even as his arms worked quickly, aligning himself against the hull of Purgatory and coiling his legs under him. With a kick of his legs, he launched himself off Purgatory, closing the distance to the frigate on inertia alone in the space of seconds. A sharp jerk of his torso rotated him in the weightless environment, aligning his feet with the hull of the frigate as the distance between the two rapidly closed. He mentally counted off the seconds to landing, allowing himself a moment of exultation as the soft soled boots of him and his team entered inside the safe radius, too close to be detected by external sensors, or hit with anything the ship carried now.

He was right, but he was also wrong.

The first sign that something had gone wrong was when the ship broke free from the airlock bridge in a sudden noiseless eruption of explosive decompression. Only one of the team saw it, lifting an arm in alarm to call the attention of the others. And then Caska saw it, a moment of dread starting to filter into his consciousness as the ship moved underneath him before his magnetic locks could engage, the hull moved and _rotated_. The last thing he saw was the stylized white lettering 'SR-2 NORMANDY' rapidly filling up his entire view. And then he never saw another thing ever again.

* * *

_Two minutes ago_

Ambushes and double crosses are very contingent acts that share more than a few things in common. Both allow a much weaker party to turn the tables on the stronger, while frequently getting back much more than they invested in the effort. But they also share the same core weaknesses. One particular case for example, is that the success of the plan often hinges on the would-be victim never seeing it coming, or if they did, it would be too late to do anything about it. That did not apply here.

Shepard had seen it coming literally light years away, and had made good on his preparations with Miranda's cooperation. Not willing to tip their hand to the warden early, especially if the commander's suspicions had proven unnecessary, the Cerberus operative had acquired the schematics for a new sensor array best suited for the job. Originally built to supplement topographical planetary surveys in a timely manner, the Argus satellite array had been re-purposed to serve a far more militaristic purpose as an additional set of eyes to the Normandy's already comprehensive sensor suite.

Barely the size of a human thumb, the micro satellites serenely orbited their parent frigate. Disguised as the usual space debris of ejected garbage, sweeping the Purgatory with miniature optical apertures and guided on their paths by seemingly normal bleed off from the ship's artificial gravity systems, the surveillance systems tracked every inch of the prison vessel. Individually, the resolution from each drone's cameras would be poor, only just able to resolve a human sized face at a hundred meters. But the hundreds that floated in cold vacuum painted together a picture of the prison ship far superior to even the frigate's advanced internal sensors. When the minute maintenance hatch had popped, the Argus system had seen it. When the teams had begun their slow exit into cold space, Normandy's AI had known, relaying their positions to all members of the ground team.

When they had waited for their distraction team to play its part, Shepard was already in motion.

Hidden inside the ship, secure in the knowledge that they would not be detected, the distraction team had left their eezo cores running, bullet stopping kinetic barriers powered and on standby. It didn't save them. Cutting edge gravimetric sensors had already detected the micro gravity distortions caused by the exotic element in their suits, even through the background wash of the both ship's eezo cores. Their positions and movements were already being fed into the encrypted tactical network the commander shared with the rest of his team even as the Blue Suns flooded into the terminal gate. The two prison guards who crouched by the exterior airlock with cutting charges, hiding beneath the shroud of a tactical cloak to fool optical sensors, worked quickly but confidently, unaware that they were already being tracked.

Not until the airlock door unexpectedly hissed open.

There wasn't even time to blink.

A storm of red hot death roared as the doors slid open, scything down the cloaked guards in a single instant of unrelenting fury, their kinetic barriers flaring into existence before splintering underneath the concentrated firepower of Shepard's fireteam. The other members of the boarding party scrabbled away from the deathtrap of the airlock corridor, chased by the storm of deadly metal and a toroidal metal object that bounced once on Purgatory's deck. It's ballistic arc terminated a dozen meters away from where it had been thrown, vanishing in a brilliant flash of radiation and sound that blinded eyes, unshielded sensors and ears with equal ferocity.

The mechanical shutters that had closed over Shepard's optics at the last instant had only begun to raise, but the krogan was already through the window of their slackening fire. Roaring a war cry as he brought up the shotgun to bear on a blinded mercenary, the krogan fired a fistful of micro pellets that shredded the man's failing kinetic barriers. Disdaining the use of his weapon on his reeling opponent, Grunt smashed his head into the stumbling guard, the crack of the crumpling helmet and skull loud even over the echoes of the shotgun. Quieter but no less deadly, Zaeed sprinted from behind, smoothly smashing the butt of his rifle into the face of a mercenary fumbling for the grenade pinned to his chest before slamming the weapon through the opening under the chin with the crack of cartilage snapping.

Stamping behind with a deceptively sedate pace, Shepard cleared through the airlock, his autocannon sweeping from side to side as it tracked the power signatures his sensors were feeding him, wordless orders transmitted to his team through the tactical network as he prioritized targets. To his left, a missile team found themselves on the receiving end of Zaeed's incendiary grenade, turning them into screaming torches before they could even get a shot off. Beside them, a squad with a grenade launcher withered beneath the angry roar of Shepard's autocannon, the sole survivor diving to grab the dropped weapon when Garrus's carbine chattered, the prison guard's head vanishing in a spray of blood and bone. An alert blared in Shepard's consciousness, warning him of an outgoing transmission attempt. Targeting reticules bracketed the source, a Blue Sun's commander in the back of the terminal marked by the energized armoured plates he wore on his shoulder, already screaming into his helmet microphone.

The grenade launcher on Shepard's shoulder was a throwback to the days pre-dating mass effect technology, using a simple magnetic coil mechanism to accelerate it's payload to it's lethal velocity. But there was nothing primitive about the load sitting in it's firing chamber. Accelerating to it's high subsonic velocities, the grenade screamed across the intervening space between Shepard and the mercenary commander in less than a second. Blue white light flared as the powered armour's computer registered the threat, kinetic barriers flaring into existence to stop the projectile. There was a metallic 'crunk', distinct even in the roar of battle, as the grenade squashed it's head against the unyielding barrier of solidified air, triggering the arming mechanism and subjecting a milligramme of element zero to a powerful negative electrical charge.

The laws of physics in a five meter radius were rewritten for an instant in a blast of dark energy, kinetic barriers losing their potency as gravitationally solidified air lost it's consistency. The second charge fired, channelling the power of fifty grammes of military grade explosives into a liner plate, the blast liquefying and accelerating a hypersonic bolt of molten uranium-titanium alloy through the breach in the kinetic barriers and into the batarian's chest. Nano-woven armour plate designed to stop small arms fire and dissipate hundreds of degrees of heat failed under the combined assault of kinetic and thermal energy, jetting away in puffs of ferrous vapour as the bolt bored through the underlying ballistic mesh with contemptuous ease. The liquid projectile erupted through the back of the batarian's torso, spraying charred viscera and molten armour plate as the entire back and spine were torn away in a steaming cloud of boiling blood, white hot fragments battering the barriers of his bodyguards and sending the disembodied head spinning into the air trailing smoke as it's torso-less limbs fell apart in a burning clatter.

The Blue Suns counter-attack momentarily trailed off, those who were still standing frozen at the sight of their commander's steaming remains. Shepard's team had no such compunctions. Another Blue Sun prison guard went down to fire from Garrus's carbine, rapid fire bursts shattering barriers and armour to tear at soft flesh underneath while another literally disintegrated from a point blank discharge of Grunt's massive shotgun. The Blue Suns snapped out of their temporary paralysis, opening fire with the ferocity borne of desperation, but more than half the Suns down and their reduced firepower was starting to show. Shepard began to stride into the thickest cluster of their defences, accepting the fusillade of shots that rammed into his unyielding kinetic barriers as he raised his autocannon to reply in kind.

A threat alert blared in his consciousness, instantly warning him of a targeting laser illuminating his bulk. High speed servos slewed his sensor pod to the left, spotting a trio of guards with unfamiliar, boxy weapons in their arms, the business ends glowing with a brilliant blue aura. Something screamed inside of him, instinct and experience bundled together shouting a warning.

_"NOW JOKER. N-_"

Three bolts of lightning arced into the air, effortlessly shearing through kinetic barriers to strike with a crack of immense power. Armour plate burned and blackened where the lightning struck, but the true damage was transmitted deep within the mass of electronics that comprised his body. Emergency cutoffs and failsafes burned themselves out in the engineered bid to prevent catastrophic damage, but many other parts failed completely, systems shorting out as they were overloaded by voltages that they were never built to handle. Powered limbs quivered under a chaotic stream of corrupted commands, sight and sensor readouts instantly vanished in a hail of intermittent static as electricity arced and danced across his body.

In a single moment of sight, he watched in horror as the same lightning wreathing his body lancing out to strike at Garrus, the turian stiffening where he stood under the electrical assault before collapsing, his forward momentum sending him down in a tangle of twitching limbs. Auditory sensors picked up the sounds of Zaeed turning the air blue with curses, his rifle chattering away before another whipcrack of artificial lightning brought him down with a yell. Something in Shepard's knee actuator gave, corrupted data streams crashing their error checking systems and causing them to fall to his knees. A ragged cheer went up among the Blue Suns, not seeing the weapon arm slew jerkily to face the trio. The mental command to fire failed to reach it's goal, almost. With an angry roar, the autocannon concealed in his arm sprayed the team with their lightning weapons, but the aim was off, clipping the kinetic barriers on one of the guards before his control over the weapon died in a shower of system errors. The emotionless voice of the onboard VI intoned the status of secondary systems, counting down the seconds but the Sun's weapons had began glowing again, charging for another strike. For the first time in a very long time, Shepard felt the taste of desperation permeating his consciousness.

With an ear splitting shriek of tortured metal, the airlock gate behind them sheared free of the superstructure, torn away from it's mountings as the Normandy departed on his desperate orders. The local atmosphere screamed through the gaping hole in the ship, pulling the Blue Suns off their feet in a hurricane of howling air. The heavy weapons squad stumbled, their aim thrown off in the sudden panic of explosive decompression despite their sealed suits. Bellowing defiance amidst the maelstrom of evacuating air, Grunt bounded ahead of the stricken commander on magnetic boots, disintegrating one of the trio's kinetic barriers with the roar of his shotgun. The three recovered quickly, turning their weapons on him and wreathing the krogan in a storm of lightning mid-charge. Even in his state, the commander could not help but feel a brief moment of vicious glee, comprehending the real nature of the weapons, and what they would, or wouldn't, do to a krogan's physiology.

Grunt didn't even slow down.

_"I!"_

Trailing wreathes of arcing electricity, the bellow terminated as Grunt bodily smashed into the trio with outflung arms, pained screams from three throats filling the air as the deadly, incapacitating energies conducted through their suits, electrocuting them with their own weapons.

_"AM!"_

A powerful krogan fist mercilessly pummelled the tangled bodies, crushing trigger hands into red ruin and knocking a man down with a hammer blow punch. He didn't even have time to struggle before Grunt drove his massive foot into the man's chest with the crack of crumpling armour plate. Driving his shotgun downwards, the resulting blast took a man's leg off at the thigh, the windmilling guard stumbling backwards only long enough for Grunt to grab the sparking chestplate and deliver a headbutt that snapped the guard's head at an unnatural angle. Another Blue Suns guard attempted to blindside the krogan with a shotgun, only to be stretched out on the floor by Shepard's autocannon, secondary systems rebooting and restoring weapon functionality.

"KROGAN!"

The last surviving guard threw down his gun and tried to flee, but Grunt snapped forward, grabbing the man by his leg. With a sharp jerk, Grunt pulled the man off his feet and began swinging him around like a ragged doll, the captive Sun's shrill screams fading in the rapidly dissipating atmosphere before the krogan let go. The armoured guard went sailing out the tear in the airlock, limbs flailing wildly as he exited the local gravitational field and shrank into the void. Shepard watched the guard dwindle into nothingness as his systems completed their reboot phase, rising to his feet as the others of his squad picked themselves off the ground, still feeling the effects of their sudden electrocution. Knowing personally what it was going to be like, Shepard felt a pang of sympathy for the doomed guard's fate.

Almost.  
_  
_

* * *

_"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now going to zero-g and conducting evasive manoeuvres, kindly return your trays to the upright position, buckle your seatbelts and _hang on to your lives_!"_

It wasn't the most auspicious of take off messages the pilot could have given, but it did get the results he was hoping to get when he disabled the Normandy's artificial gravity. Not that there would have been time to worry about slackers with Shepard's urgent command still hanging in the air. There was the familiar lurch of his stomach in the sudden free fall as gravity went to zero, but no one panicked or yelled in surprise and everyone on the command deck secured in their stations, so that was a plus. He sincerely hoped that everyone was strapped in though, because what came next was not going to be enjoyable to anyone in free fall once the thrusters hit. Becoming a two hundred pound missile in a room full of hard surfaces and sharp edges would ruin anyone's day. Fingers dancing across the holographic haptic displays, he sealed the primary airlocks and fired up the starboard yaw thrusters. The Normandy groaned underneath him at the first roar of thrusters, but a moment later she pulled through just fine, breaking free of that prison ship and it's airlocks in the wash of escaping atmosphere from the tear she left in it. Shepard was inside, but there weren't any worries about spacing the commander this time. This had been planned for, and the pilot had more things to worry about right now than the immediate predicament of his commander.

"Bugs on my windscreen" he hummed, naming the first order of business he'd have to deal with, simultaneously executing a full 360 roll with another pulse on the Normandy's thruster array. She rolled a little heavy, probably from still having bits of the Purgatory airlock stuck to her, but that was something the normally perfectionist pilot couldn't deal with now. Even through the thick armour, numerous thumps and cracks of something impacting the hull managed to permeate into the command deck, though nothing that worried the Cerberus pilot very much, at least about the ship's integrity. The would-be hijackers however, were probably having a very bad day as Joker's frigate sized boot greased the lot of them against it's hull. The contacts on his tac-screen vanished, or went very far away at very fast speeds as Normandy completed it's barrel roll, and Joker chuckled. "Bug-be-gone, good thing Gardner's the ja-whooaaah!"

Joker had all half of a second to respond to the sudden threat alert that blossomed on the tac-screen, a thermal build up that was anything but thruster emissions. A competent Alliance pilot would have taken a fraction of a second to register the threat, another fraction to formulate the appropriate response. Joker was no mere competent pilot. He skipped the second half, stabbing down on a control that burned more anti-matter reaction mass, sending the Normandy into a corkscrewing dive, and not a moment too soon. An intense blast of focused infrared energy seared the intervening space between Purgatory and the Normandy, only the last instant manoeuvre turning a strike that would have speared the Normandy's primary thrusters into a glancing hit that burned a dark helical scorch pattern on it's armour. Normandy had been built strong, her multi-layered ablative armour plating rated to weather dozens of GARDIAN strikes on any point before failing, but it was not a guarantee that Joker wanted to test. Besides, he had his pride as the best pilot there ever was.

More threat alerts popped up on his screen, and the pilot punched the Normandy's engines to full bore, powering through evasive manoeuvres that were half instinct and all Joker, minimising the impact of the laser strikes by keeping the ship constantly rotating against the Purgatory's GARDIAN batteries. Flashing his hands across the numerous control interfaces, he managed to find the spare concentration to dart an eye to the terminal beside him, feeling justifiably annoyed at how things were turning out. Another beam of energy lanced out from the Purgatory's GARDIAN defences, scoring a long line on the port hanger deck that boiled away paint and scorched refractive armour layers meant to withstand just such an assault. "EDI, I thought you were jamming their targeting sensors!"

The AI's holographic globe popped into existence above the terminal, replying in that oh-so-calm voice that grated on Joker.

"I am currently employing all of the Normandy's electronic countermeasures to maximum effect Mr Moreau." Joker didn't sneer at the intelligence's defence, because he was too busy avoiding ploughing into one of the extended prison blocks of Purgatory in the midst of it's active GARDIAN defenses. "However, our close proximity to Purgatory is reducing the effects of our jamming systems and does not prevent optical tracking from being employed in place of compromised sensor systems. I suggest we increase the distance between both vessels if we are to avoid taking further damage."

"They're eyeballing it? And I thought I was the only one with the ship full of crazy." The sarcastic comment however, did not stop Joker from taking the AI's advice, redundant since they were already heading away as fast as their sublight drives could push them, to heart. Another pulse of energized radiation burned it's way across the hull as Joker pulled the ship into a drunken corkscrew, arcing away at a shallow dive that put them beneath the Purgatory and out of sight from most of the weapon's arc, but not all. Their departure was still chased by several more spears of focused infrared energy, but they were fewer than before and spinning hull of Normandy prevented the impacts from doing more than scorching the hull metal. Even that didn't last long, as the impacts grew less and less accurate as Normandy continued to put distance between it and the Purgatory until the shots were missing completely. When the third consecutive shot missed, Joker let out a sigh of relief he'd been holding in. Outside of eyeballing range, they'd have to rely on sensors to hit reliably, something any Alliance pilot worth his license could avoid. Joker could do this in his sleep. Of course the fact that they were outside of the effective range didn't hurt either.

Not that they were out of the woods yet.

"I am detecting increased broad spectrum sensor tracks from the external perimeter Mr Moreau. Telemetry suggests Purgatory's fighter escorts have begun their attack run."

Joker spared a split second to shoot the artificial intelligence an irritated look. "I can read a tactical display just fine mom, sheesh."

They were lighting up the edges of the globular tactical net like a swarm of insects, taking an approach vector that had them closing in from just about everywhere in front of them. The IFF library tagged them as Sickle class fighters, not quite top of the line like his baby, but they packed a mean punch above the usual weight. Not just the usual double bulges under their fuselage, they'd be carrying pulse lasers too. The math said that Normandy could be expecting eighty disruptor torpedoes in less than half a minute, and that same number loaded with plain old explosives once their barriers were down, and of course a lot of fighter class lasers trying to cut his ship up once they got in range. That didn't worry Joker very much, their tactics were bog standard, and eighty to one odds of jinky, but downright dumb, missiles was just warm up practice. Not to mention the fact that Normandy's GARDIAN suite was no slouch either.

Raising a hand, he ticked down the seconds on his finger, and just as the last one closed into a fist, the tactical display lit up with more contacts, the tracked velocity indicating that they were indeed the torpedoes he had predicted. "Man did I call it or what?" the pilot muttered to himself, arming the GARDIAN system and preparing to let the laser system fly, "these guys are using tactics so old school you can see it from light years away-"

Joker trailed off as eighty tracks on the display suddenly split and quadrupled in number, accelerating to speeds a conventional disruptor torpedo wouldn't have been able to match. Instead of the leisurely original thirty seconds, they had about two thirds that before impact. The pilot rubbed his stubble covered chin with a free hand as he stared at the now very crowded display.

"Oh-kay... that's new."

* * *

**A/N: A bit shorter than my usual chapters, but I've decided to break up the chapters a bit for the Purgatory section since at it's full size, it's going to stretch around to a mini-arc length. That being said, it makes more sense that Kurill would have something like that lightning gun for it's riot breaking potential on the more valuable prisoners and I can't really see Cerberus playing Santa Claus, showering Shepard with weapons and armour like they do with the DLC.**


	10. Chapter 10: Detention Part II

**Chapter 10: Detention Part II  
**

_**Threat detected.**_

_Begin process runtime: Scenario A001_

EDI was an artificial intelligence. On the Ventura scale of intelligences, she was classed as a magnitude six, a theoretical level of lateral and parallel intellect that was not possible yet. A fusion of state of the art human and stolen Reaper processing systems had made her existence possible, analogue hardware blocks limited her capabilities and core governing processes built into her runtimes provided the primary impulse for all the decisions she could make. The first governed loyalty to the Illusive Man, the second to Commander Shepard, and the third towards the well being of the Normandy and her crew. The first and second were not in the immediate priority queue, and could not be considered with the abilities present. The third dealt with the immediate threat that was facing the ship, and had priority. The threats were easily detectable, even at their significant distance. Search radars had tracked their metallic frames the moment they had parted from their carrier, and thermal blooms that preceded them were bright stars in a field of cold black, easily visible to the thermo-optic sensors.

The display console on the helm controls lit up with three hundred and twenty pinpricks, each one indicating an active seeker warhead and their estimated time to impact. EDI did not require the visual representation like an organic would, computing the tracks and likely intercept courses from the raw data alone. Sophisticated passive threat detection systems picked up incoming signals, separating tracking radars from the seeker warheads by their high powered rapid output. Normandy's active sensor suite, already at combat setting from the moment they had withdrawn from the Purgatory, flared to their maximum output, filling the void with all manner of high powered radiation, collecting critical data on the approaching threats and instantly boiling the bodily fluids of the sole Blue Sun's mercenary to survive the earlier attempt at shaking off the space borne infiltration.

_**Estimated time to impact: 0.19.575**_

_Threat identification complete. 320 individual multi-band search radars. Behaviour pattern indicates swarm type missile configuration. Classification: Hornet Swarmer. Estimated total payload at 4.6 times required to breach barriers._

_Process 01440: Avoidance Simulation commencing._

Fourteen simultaneous programs began, calculating all the various factors and loading them into the central simulation. Analytical programs ran millions of cycles processing detected sensor emissions from the missiles, comparing them against the library of weapon profiles, searching for weaknesses to exploit. Databanks loaded with the performance projected of jamming and electronic countermeasure suites flared to life computing their effectiveness against hostile seekers. Real time simulations were run on the performance of the Normandy's GARDIAN laser suite, marking probable kills within the limited time frame, and then run again from differing angles of approach. Evasive patterns were loaded, fed into the calculations, and run as a whole, producing terrabytes of simulated data and their results.

_**Estimated time to impact: 0.19.303**_

_Analysis summary: 56.7% probable hits on incoming tracks, 12.8% avoided. 30.5% probable impacts._

_Conclusion: Normandy destroyed._

Had EDI's hardware architecture lacked just one programming block, her process cycles would have locked up at the unsatisfactory projected outcome. Had she been a less advanced an artificial intelligence, she would have run the simulations again, attempting to find the most optimum route despite the unchanging results. But a magnitude six intelligence was not restricted by existing data, or tactical doctrines already experienced. She was able to track multiple parallel processes, not only factoring existing data, but as humans put it, thinking out of the box. New processes were started, directives running through different variables and entirely new lines of countermeasures to employ. System resources used for previous simulations were devoted into creating new simulations not already pre-loaded into the databanks. For the first time since she had been deployed on the Normandy, her electronic warfare systems were tasked to capacity as she began exploring alternative solutions that would ensure the Normandy's signal. Each simulation was tested in real time with brief flares of activity from the active ECM systems built into the Normandy, running through theories and extrapolating results when an alert flag touched upon her systems.

_**Incoming burst transmission**__  
Channel: Restricted Tactical Net  
Origin: Purgatory Station  
Authorization: Command Operative 321-ADF-437-S  
Priority request Alpha Zero One._

A cycle of processing power went unused as her emotional substrata paused in conflict. The signal originated from Commander Shepard, requesting cycles be directed to overwhelming Purgatory's internal networks. One primary behavioural protocol demanded that she comply to the highest priority order available. Another directed that preserving the ship and it's mission parameters were of similar priority. Prioritizing Shepard's request as instructed would relocate cyberwarfare resources currently being employed against the incoming missiles, jeopardizing the ship and resulting in mission failure. Delaying Shepard's request could result in compromising their team with the limited data available. Another cycle went by unused, threatening to cascade into a system crash before a tertiary module activated, logic cores overriding the conflict with probability estimates.

Commander Shepard's situation was currently unknown, but all team life signs were nominal following the earlier dip during the emergency separation. Probability estimates gave a 60% chance that a slight delay in processing his directive was acceptable until the immediate threat was neutralized. The resources allocation request would be placed in a buffer stack. Preserving Normandy took priority, the Commander was on his own until the immediate threat was neutralized.

_**Estimated time to impact: 0.17.996**_

But by her calculations, she had sufficient time.

* * *

The trouble with missiles in Joker's grand opinion, was that they were dumb. The manufacturers made a lot of noise about high end sensors, multi-frequency data sharing and really fast thrusters, but nobody paid attention to the smarts that drove it all. Oh sure, they had the whole idiot savant thing going for the good ones, wouldn't be fooled by decoys and were wizards against the usual amount of jamming you could shake at them. But the only thing they ever did was pick the shortest route from point A to B. No imagination, no coordination. So yeah, totally dumb. No matter how many were launched, they wouldn't try to cut you off, herd you where they wanted, none of the standard tricks you taught scrub pilots in Swarming 101. Not that they had a Swarming 101 for their pilots of course, the Alliance may have been filled with blowhard pilots, but their instructors weren't totally dumb. Standard Alliance tactical doctrine for dealing with missile swarms was to back off, let the GARDIAN systems and ECM deal with the threat with a couple more seconds retreating bought you.

Joker was the best pilot who ever lived, but he'd never been one for doctrine when he had genius on his side.

Instead of firing the manoeuvring thrusters to bring the Normandy about, he pointed the ship right into the centre of the incoming swarm. Pressing down on the accelerator pedal with his feet, a design throwback to the 20th century, he felt the steady hum underneath him grow to a much louder thrum as his baby spooled up to full speed. The countdown clock in the sensor panel dropped by a few more seconds, mirrored by an alarmed yell from one of the bridge crew behind him. Joker just kept the accelerator depressed, feeding even more anti-matter fuel into the thrusters. A brief flick of his eyes to an attendant display showed showed the ECM suite already running on maximum power, EDI was apparently earning her keep. In a less demanding situation, and he would have spared the time to roll his eyes. 'Faster than an organic operator' yeah right, as if he couldn't tell just how ineffective jamming would be against that many seeker heads. At least Cerberus had made the right call bringing him in. See if an AI could beat his flawless flying. Flicking the GARDIAN system to manual, he traced a circle of priority targets on the display, waiting for the timer to count down to single digits.

He thumbed the activation button.

It wasn't like the old school videos of how laser weapons worked. No bright spears of light or cheesy sound effects to clutter his tactical display, but they did the job just fine. Twenty contacts vanished from his display in less than a second, and then another fifteen in the next, the number of confirmed kills dwindling as the temperature in their focusing arrays spiked. The next burst, he knew from experience, would be the last before impact. But it was enough. A hole was burned through the swarm of missiles, right in the path of the speeding Normandy. Barely just large enough to fit the frigate through. One chance, and even then there were a half dozen missiles close enough to hit them if they had good enough proximity fuses. Strapped into his seat, face rapt with attention, Joker couldn't help but feel the hammering of his heart as the closing missiles merged into one giant doughnut shaped blob on his display. This was where the flying was the most intense, where he felt most alive.

And he loved every second of it.

Tiny bursts of the lateral thrusters augmented their heading, sliding the Normandy a half degree to port and side slipping the first missile by a dozen meters. The GARDIAN system pulsed once more, cutting a missile in half and detonating it's payload harmlessly away from it's target. Four more to go. Temperature warnings flared a half second after he had predicted, the primary thrusters nearing their maximum design tolerances. He kept it in his head, but continued pouring on the reaction mass. His baby could handle it, just for a little longer. Twisting the yaw pedals with his feet, port and starboard thrusters vectored horizontally in the opposite directions, sending the ship into another spin as a pair of missiles flared into dangerous proximity. Just bit more. Collision alarms hooted, the impact warnings reaching a crescendo as the missiles nearly touched the edges of their kinetic barriers. He reversed the pedal directions, the roar of plasma exhaust abruptly halting their spin with a jarring groan that even the inertial compensator couldn't fully suppress. The missiles couldn't correct their heading in time and streaked on past, just only missing the rear thrusters, payload undetonated. Internal gyroscopes began to correct their spin, VI managed seeker routines calculating the probable location of the Normandy and redirecting the vectored thrust systems, bringing the missiles about to begin the chase anew

Until they entered the superheated exhaust of the Normandy.

GARDIAN rated armour melted like hot wax beneath the incandescent flare of her engines, sublimating instantly into a billowing cloud of white hot metal. The warheads detonated, the blue white aura of dark energy sending ripples that bucked the Normandy's kinetic barriers like a hammerblow but didn't shatter them. And then they were through, the swarm of missiles having missed their mark with more than a few caught in the wave of distorted gravity. Those that were caught were torn apart by the conflicting forces, wildly flying off on remaining inertia and venting fuel, while others sped on, their target lost. Joker felt the grin creep up his face, another successful trick up his sleeve. But they weren't done yet. The missiles that were still active were curving around, beginning the chase anew... he sighed, and there was the second wave of launches from those fighters. Those Blue Suns, really, really didn't like him he decided.

Without warning, the pursuing missiles, even those that had only just been launched, exploded. Clouds of debris and gravitic shockwaves spread through empty space tens of kilometres away from their target, with more than a few of the fighters that launched them caught in the detonations. Joker gaped at the spectacle, quickly forming one explanation to the next before directing a sharp look at the holographic display beside him.

As if the act alone had summoned her, the blue globe of EDI's avatar flashed into existence.

"Did you do that?" Pointing was a useless gesture, but the pilot felt the need to do it anyway, randomly stabbing a finger at the display.

"The missiles were using a linked communications network to share sensor data and guidance instructions Mr Moreau. Breaking the network firewalls and executing self destruct protocols required slightly more time than was initially calculated, but sufficient to end the threat."

All delivered in that matter of fact voice he was starting to hate with a passion. "That's a yes isn't it? Well if it wasn't for my fine piloting, you wouldn't have had the time to do any of those calculations." He bounced back, but it sounded a little hollow even to his ears. She had just made his job a little easier after all. Very, very quietly, and only just to himself, he added "Good job anyway."

"You're welcome Mr Moreau."

Damnit.

* * *

**Purgatory, D ****Block****, Security checkpoint D-21.**

The multi-warhead grenade bounced once on the floor before shooting up into the air. A micro-charge detonated, sending it's spherical payloads ricocheting across the room in a deadly hail of steel, coring thin metal desks like wet paper. But lethality was not their intended design. Barely a half second after they were scattered, their internal timers went off, flashbangs blazing like tiny novas, filling the entire room with piercing light and sound sharp enough to knock a grown man to the floor. Blue Suns guards poured through the breach in the welded open security door, guns blazing as their helmet mounted sensors fed them targeting data accurate to the millimetre. A heavy came close behind on their heels, distinct from the rest of his squad by the glowing sheathe of reinforced barriers, the ARC Projector in his hands glowing with the hum of barely controlled energies, ready to spit electric death at whatever survived the firestorm.

The air turned dark around him, and suddenly the commander was jerked off the ground by invisible strings. His legs kicked once in surprised weightlessness before a narrow corridor of air warped and twisted, slamming the screaming mercenary into the unyielding deck plates with the crack of pulverizing bones. Another guard fell screaming to the ground, wreathed in hungry flames as an incandescent spray of white hot shrapnel slammed into his chest and ignited. A shotgun roared once in anger, thousands of supersonic micro-pellets shredding the kinetic barriers and piercing where armour lay weakest. Elbows and neck joints spurted blood as flexible ballistic cloth and flesh was ripped through with equal ease. One more was yanked off his feet by a flash of dark blue light, pitching him over a railing where his final shriek was cut short by a wet thud.

That left four more, and this time, they weren't relying on their sensors anymore.

Jacob ducked behind a sparking control console, nearly losing his head to a storm of bullets buzzing past where it'd been a heartbeat ago. He didn't stop to take a breath, kicking out with his feet and launching away from the console as the guard's aim corrected, riddling the console with holes the size of his thumb. A heavy pistol barked twice in rapid succession, and the fire slackened momentarily. Jacob didn't waste a second scrambling behind more solid cover as he ejected the spent heat sink, taking care not to let the white hot chunk of metal touch him. A quick tap slipped out a fresh heat sink from his vest pocket and he slid it in with a practised motion. The last one too, by his mental count, and a still a whole lot of guards left to go through.

Instead of firing the weapon, he tracked the direction of fire from where it was noisiest, and pulled up his arm. A corona of swirling blue light enveloped the limb as he triggered a very specific set of neural synapses with the mnemonic action. Clenching the hand into a fist, he jerked the encased arm forward, and was rewarded with a startled cry from several throats as his guess dumped several hundred newtons of biotic force where it was least wanted. Desks, loose crates, and data slates went flying, knocking men off their feet in a storm of debris. On the other side of the room, Miranda nodded appreciatively as she tossed a tech mine into the flurry where it flared into electric life, shorting out kinetic barriers as their generators overloaded and burned out. Jacob rose to his feet, only managing to clip one with an incendiary round before the other three sent him scurrying back into cover with a snarl of automatic fire.

Even though he knew it was a futile effort, he spent a heartbeat checking the communications bead in his ear for any of the others. The spiteful static of jamming answered his ping request, they were in too deep for anything but short range communications. They were lightly armed, low on munitions, not to mention outnumbered on a ship full of heavily armed thugs and an inmate populace filled to the brim with the galaxy's worst killers. Any backup they could hope for was either out of touch, dealing with their own problems, or just not there.

All things considered, things seemed to be working out pretty well.

He knew he should be keeping his mind on the fight, but it kept drifting back to the way the commander had predicted this, more or less. It kept nagging at him even as he vaulted out of cover, taking the distraction of Miranda's pistol to advance, firing a round that ripped through depleted shields and body armour in the space of a second. He was already diving behind fresh cover when his target hit the ground.

He shouldn't have been surprised, he told himself. He'd been inured to double crosses and backstabbing in his tenure with the Corsairs, long before he got involved with Cerberus internal politics. But he'd gotten the same briefings that Miranda had. A nasty piece of work for a turian, calling the warden a scumbag would be an insult to scumbags all across the Terminus Systems. The turian had successfully extorted hundreds of colonized star systems, including human ones, with his dangerous payload. The only difference between the warden and a pirate slaver was that his extortion racket was legal by Citadel law, making him immune to any law enforcement unit. Even the sale of prisoners to people wanting vengeance appeared to sit in that grey area the Council didn't acknowledge, and he'd been too smart to make any slip ups to draw attention. Additionally, there was the fact that he never sold out a client. That reputation had been why they'd been so sure the exchange would go without a hitch. As far as Kurill was concerned, this would be just another transaction to him. Selling them out now wouldn't have made sense. Even if he pulled it off it, word would get around, it would have killed his business for good.

The commander had been insistent however, leaving Jacob wondering if the man in the cyborg shell was getting a little paranoid. Miranda did more than a little wondering even as she helped formulate their plan.

"I guess the commander was right after all." The sub-vocalized words on his communicator brought Miranda's deceptively nonchalant face around to him. The Cerberus operative was backed up against a bulkhead, calmly programming another tech mine as bullets sparked off the abused metal. For a moment her eyes flashed with a glint of anger, but then it was gone, replaced by a faint twist of the lips he'd come to recognize as close to a rueful expression as she'd ever had.

"I suppose he was Jacob."

The rueful look evaporated, to be replaced by one of minor irritation. She leapt out of cover, catching a guard in the face with the armed tech mine before man and smart weapon vanished in a hail of arcing electricity. Jacob followed up on her move with another blast of his shotgun, setting the man alight. From the corner of his eye, he noted that her face still carried that vexed look. Whatever was eating at her, it wasn't affecting her aim. Another mercenary collapsed, bleeding copiously from a neat hole in his neck courtesy of her heavy pistol. Sliding back behind cover, Jacob made an educated guess.

"Oh come on Miri, this kind of double cross is an amateur's mistake. Kurill's always been too smart to make a grab like this."

Instead of replying, a corona of blue fire surrounded Miranda's form, an answering flash of light enveloping the last Blue Sun. There was a strangled cry as he took off like a rocket, stopping only when his head connected with the bulkhead with a wet crunch. When the body hit the floor with a clatter, quiet overtook the security room. Jacob pinged his suit scanners in the sudden quiet- a few ghost signals turned up too far away to be of any concern, but of the eight man breaching team sent to deal with them, there was no activity.

Miranda popped the white hot heat sink of her pistol with a flick of her wrist, sighing as she did so.

"That's just the problem Jacob." She looked like she was about to elaborate on the point but then fell silent without explanation.

Jacob shook his head, figuring out just exactly what was eating away at her. He didn't have the kind of briefings she did, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that along with getting Shepard to cooperate wholeheartedly with Cerberus, Miranda was trying to figure out what made him tick. First it was Wilson, and now the commander had seen a trap she'd dismissed as unlikely. For someone who made an issue about her gene crafted supposed perfection, missing something the commander had spotted must have been a sharp kick to her pride.

"You're not jealous are you?"

The sharp look was back in a flash. "Oh don't be ridiculous Jacob. I admit that the commander managed to catch Kurill's trap better than I did, but I am most certainly _not_ jealous. Let's just focus on the mission shall we?"

Focusing on the mission amounted to little more than sitting tight until EDI managed to take over the Purgatory's internal systems, putting them firmly in control of the situation. Which it would have, under normal circumstances. Jacob did a little mental calculation; it hadn't been very long since he'd activated the emergency transponder and gotten a positive response to it. So with a little luck, the commander and the rest of the incursion team would already be on board and making their way to the bridge while Moreau dealt with the fighter escorts. Between the commander, Garrus Vakarian, Zaeed Massani, and their new hulking krogan friend (he still wasn't sure about the friend part), he doubted they'd have much trouble paving the way for EDI to do her job once the jamming systems were killed, if they had the time.

The thing was, no one was sure they had enough of it.

If Kurill was willing to double cross them, he was either getting desperate or dumb. Whichever was the case, both opened a lot of options to the warden. The Purgatory's current orbit prevented her from going anywhere fast, but if things were turning out too badly, the warden could try shaking off the Normandy with an emergency jump to FTL. Or he could just bring the ship down into the nearby gas giant. But if he cut his losses and ran off with Jack, they were sunk no matter what the outcome of the fight. Not an attractive prospect. If they couldn't contact the commander six minutes after hitting the panic button, plan B was to secure Jack and get out no matter what.

It'd been seven minutes now, and so far the only thing that'd answered his communications gear was a whole lot of static.

* * *

The ambush team was getting torn apart, their body armour and reinforced positions doing very little in deterring the determined advance of the intrusion team. Despite their superior numbers and positions, the intruders were moving faster than the response teams could react to. A defended position would call in an enemy contact and request reinforcements before going silent, but when the response teams arrived, the defenders would be dead and the position breached. From his position in the bridge, Synthetic Insights representative Schmidt watched, or rather listened, to the various status reports pouring in that were taking an increasingly desperate tone. A more mundane sort of person might have felt some small amount of trepidation at the progress of the intruders, but he was far more interested in the little footage they had managed to record of their apparent leader.

As he watched from one of the hard line video feeds, the assault mech ploughed through the cover of crates, bodily picking up one of the flailing guards between the armoured sheathes of its weapon arm. There was a brief moment of struggle before the helmet crumpled between the sheathes, spurting crimson fluid through the cracks. Slick with blood, the machine tossed the corpse aside as it's thermal ports finished their vent cycle, the autocannon starting it's stuttering roar again. Schmidt was impressed. Oh, not with the savagery itself, most certainly not. While he had extensive experience designing combat algorithms for virtual and low level artificial intelligences alike, they lacked the ability to rapidly adapt to changing parameters, and as efficiently, as he had seen this one do. Already his omni-tool was quite busily sorting the data they had managed to capture from local surveillance gear, producing a fascinating prognosis. The machine was certainly performing far better than anything one expected in what was usually little more than a glorified mobile gun platform.

And it was worth an absolute fortune. Imagine, a fully functional magnitude VI artificial intelligence. The magnitude Vs were considered to be among the best of contemporary intelligences, capable of a huge variety of tasks with unparallelled ability to analyze data and create astoundingly accurate predictions based on them, but they were oh so very limited in the ability to think laterally. Not to mention that the fact that they were huge machines, requiring mammoth facilities and specialized cooling systems just to run without melting into puddles of slag. Of course they could have been wrong about their conclusions, they hardly had the opportunity to subject the software gestalt to the usual battery of tests that would determine the full extent of it's capabilities after all. But the evidence acquired by Insight agents on Omega certainly argued that even if it was not a magnitude VI as suspected, it was at least a step above magnitude V. It even had a fully formed self identity, albeit one rather distastefully chosen. One shouldn't go about impersonating the dead, whether one was organic or artificial.

Oh his colleagues had muttered about robot apocalypses and machine overlords, but he had tut-tutted them as meaningless scarecrow noises not able to see past their noses. The Geth were a tragic example yes, but the Quarian reaction had been totally uncalled for. You couldn't fault a race of sentients for defending themselves against an aggressor wanting to wipe them out. On the other hand, whoever had built this marvellous machine had certainly seen no cause to restrict it's development, if those modifications were any indication of self optimization. And of course its command over a wide variety of willing sophont species too, indicating at least a working relationship between organic and inorganic life. If this was the beginning of an organic-hostile machine intelligence, then it was certainly an odd way to go about it! The documented existence of fully self aware and benign artificial intelligences helping organic life would certainly put to paid those scaremongers in the Citadel. That it would make the overturning of that archaic AI ban all that much easier and reverse Synthetic Insight's ailing fortunes ever since the Geth attack was also a point of interest.

Fortunately, Miss Lorus had agreed with his assessment, on the last point if not the rest, and dispatched him here to see to it's acquisition and delivery to Synthetic Insights labs for study. Of course there had been the unspoken risk to life and limb, but for an opportunity to be the first to study this enigma, it was such a cheap price to pay. And there was the matter of actually acquiring it mostly intact, which was where he had come in. While he had no doubt of the Wardens ability to deal with mere organic prisoners, an artificial intelligence was far, far, more difficult to contain. On his recommendation, the warden had disabled the majority of his wireless communication ports, relying instead on hard link connections and multi-band jamming to keep it from infiltrating their systems. Though that did mean disabling the majority of the automated defences, allowing an artificial intelligence with a proven capability to infiltrate and suborn integral systems with the opportunity to suborn said defences was most foolhardy.

And to help matters along, he presented them with a shipment of ARC projectors, freshly procured from one of Insight's subsidiary companies. While assault rifles and grenades were all well and good if you wanted to destroy things, they were hardly suitable for the intact capture of priceless machines. These were newly developed elelctrolasers that, while designed to stun and disable unruly people, proved to be just as equally effective against machines like that assault mech. The nature of the weapon was quite sufficient to overwhelm simple circuit breakers, scrambling the control systems of any machine and leaving it quite helpless. In all, he had brought a dozen such weapons, more than enough for the task of disabling the machine.

Now if only that krogan cooperated with how things were supposed to go. That secondary nervous system was proving to be most confounding, being rather proof against the debilitating effects of artificial lightning. And ever since that first encounter at the docking bay had been foiled, the machine and it's compatriots had been taking special care to target those using the projectors first. They had not had a second chance to disable them since. Still, the Purgatory was quite a large ship, and had a great deal of guards to throw at them. Not even a magnitude six intelligence could beat the sheer weight of numbers pressing down on it.

A brief burst of control room chatter made him take notice of where the intruders were. A hand cupped his chin in thought. Hmm, junction 6-B. He hadn't had much of an opportunity, nor inclination thank you very much, to tour the prison ship, but he was certain that 6-B was, it wasn't really all that far from this room. That, that might be a cause for concern. And it did look very grim for a machine with no facial expressions whatsoever. The purple mix of turian and human blood liberally splashed on it's arms did not help at all.

Schmidt glanced up at the control centre's surroundings, looking for a certain blue garbed turian who had assured him of his staff's capabilities. He was certainly no soldier, and he'd only get in the way of the proceedings if things did come to a head. Perhaps it would be better if he observed things from a distance, with his permission of course. However, that particular turian was no where to be- ah no, there he was, taking his leave through the fortified doors. Perhaps going to personally oversee the defences? No matter, it was not his place to guess.

Schmidt hurried over to the turian, quite eager to have his say and withdraw to a more secure location, preferably on board his ship. However, the doors closed in his face before he could reach the warden, and did not open when he tried the controls. A frown went down his face, and he tapped at the interface again. Instead of the green light of access granted, it showed a rather sullen red, something that was starting to be noticed by the rest of the control room. A few of the more alert ones appeared to be gathering their rifles, casting accusing looks his way while others raised their voices looking for the warden. It did look very bad on him he realized, though most did not seem to think he had anything to do with the warden's sudden disappearance. That... didn't do much to ease the unpleasant feeling settling in the researcher's stomach as he moved quite some distance from the door. There had been one other piece of advice he had given the warden, though he had thought it mostly superfluous at the time.

The sudden winking out of consoles and lights, plunging the room into darkness, made it clear that it was not as superfluous as he had hoped. A moment later, the room was lit by an actinic flare of light, coring the door with a plume of fire that scythed one of the guards who was standing too close. He clutched at the only protection he had, not a gun since he had no training in it's use, but his Synthetic Insights ID badge, and said the only thing that seemed to fit.

"Oh dear."

* * *

His barriers already depleted by the storm of fire, Shepard's armour was dented and deformed in a hundred places. But for all the damage it had suffered, it was mostly cosmetic. Slivers of dense metal that could punch through a man's body armour disintegrated against alloyed armour weave designed to withstand the impact of heavy weapons. The mercenaries hiding behind their impromptu cover of desks and packing crates enjoyed no such protection as the autocannon in his arm thundered in reply, ripping through thin skinned packing steel and body armour with equal facility. Only one sensor contact on his tactical map winked out under the barrage, the other two stubbornly blinking as a hand popped over the edge, primed grenade in hand. There was a sharp crack and the hand separated from it's owner, wrist exploding into red ruin. Bereft of throwing arm, the grenade fell back behind cover, clinking cheerily as it struck the ground. A voice rose in a startled curse, only to be drowned out by an explosive detonation that flung desk and bodies sprawling. Shepard didn't even slow down as he continued to press the assault into the next corridor, autocannon barking at a figure that twitched feebly. The rest of his team followed close behind in silence, mirroring his rushed mood. The engagement with the ambush had cost them eight seconds. Another slice of time they couldn't afford to spend.

They were running late.

They were carving a bloody swathe through the local defenders, but there were a lot of them and each obstacle took precious seconds to clear. It was already three minutes past their scheduled contact, and the jamming was still active on all channels, powerful enough to overwhelm even the high gain communications array mounted on his chassis. Contact with the insertion team was a futile effort while the jamming system remained powered, much less communications with the Normandy. Miranda and Jacob were competent soldiers, and he had seen how well they had worked together, but every minute that passed was another minute for the warden to trap them between the bulkheads or funnel overwhelming numbers of troops on them. They needed to shut down the jamming system, and fast. Once that happened, EDI could seize control of the ship and they would have the upper hand. He had no doubt as to the outcome of the mission, and he was not about to lose any of the team to delays if he could afford it. And yet-

He hadn't felt this way in a lifetime. Not since that time on Elysium, when everything had to be given into the crucible of fire to hold out one more minute, just another second. It's different now, he told himself, it won't end up the same way this time. But the lack of communications with the other team makes it hard. He doesn't have a heart anymore, but he can imagine it's thudding, the mix of adrenaline and raw intensity that sharpens his awareness. The silent voice demanding he push harder, faster, ignore the pain that won't come this time. And he is listening to it.

More guards intercepted them at the next intersection, firing from makeshift barricades with a mixture of shotguns and assault rifles. Grenades thumped from their launch rails, explosive payloads arcing on deceptively gentle trajectories. Electrolasers joined in the fusillade, adding the crack of lightning to the storm as they attempted to stop the interlopers. It is no longer an attempt to subdue them. Now they are shooting to kill. The first time they had encountered the weapons; ARC projectors they had been called, Shepard came a fingers breadth to losing his entire team.

Not this time.

The ones with the projectors are the first to die, a well placed missile detonating in their midst while their man-made lightning wreathes harmlessly around a guard's corpse thrown as a distraction. Impact grenades are met in mid-flight with precision autocannon fire, automated fire control protocols reacting faster than even his brain can process. The guard with the grenade launcher is suddenly rendered headless, Garrus reaping a deadly toll with disciplined bursts of his battle rifle even as his barriers spark under fire. Zaeed does not share his cold discipline, choosing instead to turn a tightly spaced group into screaming torches with an incendiary grenade. He is the leader of this team, but he gives orders only sparingly. He knows how well they fight as individuals, but not as a team save Garrus. They do not disappoint. Cover is demolished by eight hundred kilogrammes of charging Krogan at his command, sending armoured figures flying. His newly regenerated barriers sparking under the concentrated assault, Shepard continued to push forward, returning fire a hundred fold with autocannon and grenade launcher alike. There was no order to take cover, no opportunity for leapfrog manoeuvres that would protect them from incoming fire at as they advance. It is suicidal, and he knows it. But he pushes on anyway.

And then it is over, save for the spasms of the dying or the moans of the mutilated. The control room is just ahead, sealed behind sturdy looking blast doors.

There was no need for an order or gesture. Shepard shared a look with Garrus and the turian slung his rifle, loping ahead to the door while the others sought cover in preparation. He remains in the open. There isn't any cover large enough to shelter his bulk anyway. Seconds later, the door is gone, blasted open by the cutting charges they had brought with them, and the firefight has begun anew.

Grunt does not lead this charge, he does, the moment far too crucial to entrust to the headstrong krogan. The room is dark, devoid of internal lighting save for a starfield of muzzle flashes. It gives him pause for an instant. Is the darkness a tactic or scorched earth at work? An instant, and then he pushes it aside as irrelevant. Ultraviolet lamps turn shadows to light, and the darkness doesn't inconvenience him the slightest. Sixteen people of various species. Less than half of them are armed and armoured. The remainder are dressed in civil garb with only two pistols between them. The bridge crew, and thus of less immediate importance. Autocannon twinkling in the darkness, he sets a deliberate course through the control room, taking him to right into the heaviest resistance. The defenders oblige his ploy, pouring the majority of their fire into his rapidly depleting barriers at full auto, a wasteful tactic except only as a last ditch defence such as they are facing now. His own attacks are far more tightly restricted, the missile and grenade launcher dormant in the firestorm. Only the autocannon speaks with short, precise bursts to avoid unnecessary damage to the control room itself.

The rest of the team pour in behind him, barely noticed against the rampaging machine that is his form. His team enjoy the advantage, rifles seeking out the easy target of muzzle flashes. Brilliant sparks of blue white light join the red glare of weapons fire, kinetic barriers being struck and overwhelmed. Fully half their defenders fall in the first three seconds, but their defence only grows more desperate. His own barriers collapse in a corona of dispersing dark energy, the armour registering multiple impacts in the space of a second. A warning alert goes off in his head, a round has penetrated somewhere vital, and fire controls in his right arm becomes unresponsive. He recognizes the damage, but ignores it. There is no pain, and the close quarters preclude the use of it's concealed missile launcher. Automatic damage control systems engage, shutting off power to the damaged regions while secondary feeds are brought online. It takes only a moment to rectify, but the defenders are already capitalizing on it, increasing the intensity of their attacks.

Another warning alert sounds off, this time a leg actuator has been damaged, locking in mid step. Automated omni-gel packs flush their contents, molten smart plastics forming over damaged components to make critical repairs. But it is not fast enough. A tinge of worry enters his consciousness as his body overbalances, but no, not now. He has experienced this before. He will not, cannot fall here. Internal gyros whine as they struggle to retain his balance, failing a moment later as his body tilts uncontrollably forward. Defensive fire shifts direction, thinking him neutralized and seeking out the rest of the team. A mistake he capitalizes on. The arm with the missile launcher slams into the ground, halting his fall his other arm reacquires it's targets. The autocannon belches flame and death, taking a guard in the shoulder. The impact makes his body spin, rifle trigger held in a death grip as it spits rounds into his fellow guards. Only a few rounds connect, insufficient to even penetrate their barriers, but it serves as a distraction. Roaring a challenge, Grunt bounds over their barricade and lands close enough to the guards to use his powerful limbs. The remaining two hold enough presence of mind to stumble back, bringing rifles to bear. The krogan is faster, wrapping his hands around both their necks before they can twitch.

The loud crack of shattering cartilage signifies the end of their continued resistance.

The warning tone of a energy spike alerts him, the heat flare of a weapon going live. Without shifting his sensor pod, the autocannon, still glowing hot from it's firing, swerves to face the new threat. Target acquisition systems paint a crosshair on the edge of his awareness. Pistols clatter to the floor before he can fire, and a voice rings out in desperate terror.

"Don't shoot! We surrender!"

The bridge crew, a part of his mind registers as his sensor pod swivels to confirm. Most are huddled in one corner of the command centre, trying to make themselves smaller targets. A bare handful, some of them having discarded their weapons, are standing on their feet, hands in the air as they repeat their plea. It is what stops him from ending their lives.

Grunt, still in the throes of battle lust, is not so easily placated. He begins to call out a halt to the krogan, he knows what will follow if not stopped, but something prevents him from doing so at the last moment. They are agents of treachery, prepared to sell him to the highest bidder. What mercy do they deserve? It seems wrong. It is wrong. The order goes unsaid.

* * *

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. He was going to die in this terribly dismal place and there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it. Schmidt had placed his hands in the air the moment the shooting had stopped, belatedly realizing that such sudden movement might have gotten him mistaken as hostile and killed. Of course some of the bridge crew had tried pulling their guns, against his better judgement, but the mech had convinced them otherwise with that great big gun in it's arm. Shouting their surrender was a brilliant thing to do at the time, and the machine hadn't shot them full of holes yet. It's krogan companion however, didn't seem to share it's hesitation.

He'd met krogan face to face before, usually the bored mercenary Insight or their clients hired to pad security for business out in the more lawless regions. He also knew what they were capable of, at least intellectually, even if some of the things seemed exceedingly exaggerated. They were security providers, sporting a variety of weapons, naturally muscle bound and trouble prone when really didn't bear much thinking on when you had the fascinating architecture of advanced artificial intelligences to study and develop. To him, they were just a well armed part of the background, not to be annoyed if you could help it, but ignored otherwise. All of this went through his mind in the time it took for him to process what he was looking at. And that was a very short time indeed. There was something about watching nearly a tonne of rampaging krogan bearing down on you that sped one's mind up and brought it down from abstract algorithm to the here and now. The here being trapped in a room with an angry krogan and the now being just about the length of his life expectancy.

In hindsight, it would probably have been wiser to curl in a ball and hide in a corner until the end came, but Schmidt's brain was taking a tangentially different route. It might even have worked. In another time and place.

He waved his ID badge like a shield and screamed at the top of his lungs. "Don't kill me! I'm not one of them! Ohgodohgodohgod, please don't kill me!"

For his troubles, he got a backhanded swipe to the midsection that sent the badge flying and smacked him hard against the bulkheads, wheezing for breathe. The analytical part of his mind celebrated the fact that he was alive enough to register the part that he was alive enough to feel the pain as he tried to suck in a breathe that would not come. The rest of him writhed in pain and tried not to asphyxiate on the floor while his would be killer stumped closer with that ludicrously big gun. He tried begging again, but all his air deprived lungs would produce was as mewling squeak that he barely even heard. One tiny tiny voice in his head wished that he hadn't skipped that firearms training course after all. Getting instantly blown to bits was a lot more attractive than watching death coming on deliberately slow steps. Another tiny voice wondered why his pants had gotten very warm and wet.

"HOLD GRUNT"

The alien ground to a halt at the commanding voice, close enough to touch and glowering at him from behind its helmet. The important part however, was that it had stopped. Still- grunt? A title? He didn't think krogans in general liked being called exhalations. It took all three heartbeats for his mind to register the really important part. He was alive, the krogan wasn't advancing. Saved! Huzzah! Whoever commanded the krogan had prevented his unduly expiration, even if it did still hurt a great deal. Whoever that was, he could kiss their feet, metaphorically of course, and if he was still capable of breathing. Oh dear. Fortuitously, his lungs decided to work again before panic set in, and he breathed in that sweet, coppery air with all the gratitude of the nearly asphyxiated. Three breathes later, and he felt well enough to try craning his head. Who had given the command anyway, and why did he sound so well... mechanical for lack of a better word? Well, the difficulty in focusing his vision meant that he was rather looking about without much success, but his mind was rather busily filling in the gaps. Ah yes, the artificial intelligence within the assault platform. That seemed to be the logical suspect.

The artificial intelligence that was stumping towards him by the sounds of mechanical limbs.

He suddenly remembered waving that badge. The one that identified him as an agent of Synthetic Insights. It had only been for a second before he had been knocked down. But artificial intelligences didn't miss details, did they? No no, of course they didn't, they had perfect recall. And it wouldn't take a magnitude VI to put two and two together. And- and those were very menacing looking light patterns glowing from inside the sensor pod.

"YOU ARE NOT OF THE SUNS"

The voice was the same mechanical one that had halted the krogan, and up close, the harsh electronic tones sounded both very threatening and more a statement than a question. It knew, he realized with a sinking sensation. It knew what, if not who, he was. It must have already drawn the correct conclusions as to how it's plans had gone wrong and who was to blame. But he wasn't dead, so maybe it hadn't caught sight of the now missing badge. The tiny possibility of that being true kindled a great deal of self preservative hope that he wouldn't be facing a gruesome death any time soon. The first impulse was to deny everything, claim that he was really one of the Blue Suns. Of course that wouldn't work, he'd already said he wasn't one of them. Think think think. Claim to be a visitor, yes, maybe that would work. A visitor, a client of course, just here to see about getting a miscreant to vengeful hands. If no one contradicted the story, it was perfectly believable-

"YOU BELONG TO SYNTHETIC INSIGHTS"

-unless it already knew the truth.

Until five seconds ago, Schmidt had thought nothing more frightening than the approaching visage of a rampaging krogan with carnage on its mind. Now he was being forced to rapidly revise that estimate as premature in the light of new evidence. Said evidence being the expressionless sensor lights(eyes?) of a war machine that topped him by more than a head and looming over him with it's multi ton bulk. Strangely, that it was bristling with all manner of weapons pointed at him was far less frightening than the utterly blank look it was giving him. His mind was doing a very good job of filling in the blanks with all sorts of mannerisms and visual cues, admittedly human ones, that were promising a great deal of unpleasant and very drawn out gruesome fates for him.

Fortunately, his mind was also thinking up of new excuses to keep his skin intact.

"Uhm. Well. I. Well yes, I am an Insights agent. Strictly here as visitor of sorts, temporarily of course ah ha ha, really. And well, uh-" oh curse his traitorous chattering teeth, why couldn't his mouth keep up with his brain? He was saved from the embarrassment of continued excuses, and potential death, by a turian speaking.

"I think we can go over his story later Shepard, looks like we have bigger problems." Schmidt stared blankly at the blue armoured turian that had spoken for a moment before realizing that it was the one that had come in with the machine. When combined with the fact that he was currently interfacing with the disabled command consoles with his omni-tool, Schmidt rather felt that he knew what those "bigger problems" were. Unfortunately, they also translated to bigger problems for him too.

"This command centre's dead, there's some residual current on some of the circuits, but nothing we can use. Looks like someone blew the power feeds just before we got here, probably a lockdown protocol. I'd bet quite a lot on the warden having a secondary command system somewhere, probably using a hardline connection if he wants to keep out any wireless intrusion attempts." In the dim light, he could make out the turian shaking his head. "I could track down the split, but it'd take a lot of time that we don't have."

A human might have redirected some of his attention towards the turian as he spelled out Schmidt's doom, but the machine's sensor pod never wavered from his face. To his vast relief, the intelligence withdrew from him and turned it's weapons on the rest of the bridge crew who had huddled into one corner of the room.

"YOU WILL PROVIDE SOLUTIONS"

It emphasized the words by opening the weapon sheathes, the exhaust ports hissing menacingly with escaping steam. Schmidt took a look at the machine, at the rest of his squad and came to a very logical conclusion. Even if the crew were cooperative, they were not likely to be kept around alive for much longer. That meant it would not be prudent for him to stay, oh no no no. Fingers crawled on the ground as he tried to make himself very small and moving towards the door. He risked a look behind him. No ones attention wasn't focused on him, which was good. He turned his head back to find a pair of armoured boots right in front of him, swallowing in the process. That was bad. The barrel of a rifle found it's way under his chin, forcing him upwards to look at the glowing eye ports of a helmeted human. He was also very distinctly not wearing the colours of a Blue Suns guard. It was now very, very bad.

"And where do you bleeding think you're going?"

"Do your worst you bucket of bolts. You're getting nothing out of us."

Schmidt gaped in shock. That wasn't him, right? He wasn't ready to take a rifle butt or bullet to the face yet. No no, his mouth was still closed, he hadn't said a thing after all. It was belatedly that he realized the speaker had originated from further back in the room, where the rest of the bridge crew had been. Whatever other thoughts he was having ended rather abruptly there when the terrifying roar of that machine's weapon filled the room again. It ended a heartbeat later, and a very long one at that because it was still racing in his chest when the deafening stutter came to a halt. Ragged screaming immediately filled the absence, and he spun his head to a scene of horror. One of the technicians hadn't been just shot, his arm had been torn off at the shoulder, blood spurting fitfully from the wound as he trashed on the ground. Another of the prisoners tried to reach out for him, but the machine had him stumbling back with a gesture of it's weapon arms. It took a step towards the screaming man and... oh no, it wasn't going to- it was! Schmidt screwed his eyes shut, not wanting to see what came next.

"HE HAS CEASED TO BE USEFUL" the machine rumbled, it's mechanical voice amplified well over the fading screams of the wounded. There was a whine of limb motivators, and the moans were replaced with a hoarse gurgle, punctuated by the meaty sounds of flesh uselessly striking metal. The sounds seemed to stretch forever before terminating in a bubbling shriek and an ear splitting crack. "WHO ELSE WILL BE UNPRODUCTIVE"

Images flashed through Schmidts head, his adrenaline fuelled imagination making each one more horrible than the last. This wasn't how an artificial intelligence was supposed to behave! They didn't threaten or intimidate, they were clinically logical in everything they did! How much of human mannerisms had it absorbed? And why was it the worse examples of humanity? He wasn't just going to die here. He was going to wish he did, and a great deal sooner. It didn't take a genius of his calibre to know what would follow, and he wanted to avoid that very much. Being dead didn't frighten him that much, but it was the process that he very much wanted to avoid, especially now! The means of his immediate survival was obvious. But in the greatest of ironies, he'd gone and put the very thing that could save him out of the artificial intelligence's reach. Everything he'd advised the warden on had been specifically to prevent exactly what it was trying to do. Oh god, the machine was starting to go through the rest of the crew.

He had to think, there had to be something he could bargain with. His position with Insights? Useless! No, it had to be something with the ship. He'd gone over all the schematics, every weak point there was. No, this was the wrong way. What did it want? A hard link control of the ship? No, that couldn't be it, that wasn't why it was here. Something temporary? The answer hit him then. The jamming systems, of course! It had a ship already, and it had subordinates elsewhere inside. It would want to coordinate things wouldn't it? Yes, that had to be it. But... how was he going to disable that?

Another horrified shriek echoed in the room, sending his thoughts scattering all over the place. The turian was saying something, but he wasn't paying attention. No-no-no-no, not like this, he needed a bit more time, a hint, something, anything! He needed to offer a way to shut it down, maybe the power- of course, the power systems!

"I! I have a way!" he tried to shout, but it mostly came out as a desperate squeak. It caught the machine's attention, and it turned back to him, the tips of it's limbs gleaming with a wet slickness that made him gag just thinking about it. He tried standing up, but a hand from behind landed on his shoulder, immobilizing him. A grizzled voice spoke into his ear.

"No funny moves unless you want a third nostril."

"ELABORATE"

"Uhm, well, it's the reactor controls," he manage to get out before squeaking, the machine's sensor pod looming threateningly close to him, "there's a secondary override system in case there's ever a containment failure. It will vent the entirety of Engineering to vacuum and kill the reaction. There's emergency power backups, but they're designed for the the bare minimum of life support systems. The override is on an independent command circuit so it should still work... don'tkillmeplease!"

"You can't do that!" One of the bridge crew yelled from the back of the command room. "Without the engines we have no station keeping. Purgatory would lose orbit and drop into an uncontrolled re-entry! We'd break up in less than an hour!"

The weapon arm swung back in their direction with a hiss, instantly silencing the objector. But it didn't fire. Schmidt took that as a hopeful sign until that sensor pod whirled on him, illumination lamps glowing red like the demons his grandmother used to tell him about.

"SHOW ME AND YOU MAY SURVIVE"

Schmidt tried saying something, only to find his tongue gummed up. He nodded vigorously instead, shakily getting to his feet as the restraining arm withdrew. The prospect of survival, no matter how slim, was better than what would befall him if he did nothing. What the machine did next however, confused him. He did not recognize the harsh, electronic tones at first, but when it did, he nearly froze. It was chuckling.

"THEN PURGATORY WILL BURN"

* * *

**A/N: It's been way too long since the last update, sorry for being this late. Things just kept piling up. That being said, some might find Shepard behaving a little oddly. But then again, he's having well, it wouldn't be really what anyone would call a good day/week/year/2nd life. Not to mention those old memories. Not all heroes become the way they did by playing nice**...


	11. Chapter 11: Parole

**Chapter 11: ****Parole**

The cell blocks of Purgatory, most of the ship in fact, was a cold place. Built more like a space station than a ship, it had a lot of wide open spaces for heat to diffuse through, and with her slow burning engines, stacked up with miserly application of life support meant that keeping things warm was more of a problem than keeping cool like in most ships. Making matters worse were the lack of heating elements in the cells, not like the warm inner hallways where the guards went on their time off. Some places you could take a piss and watch it freeze before you were done. It was the kind of thing that put a permanent chill in your bones, made you slow. Not that the Warden cared about that kind of shit.

And now, neither does she.

The guard in her grasp manages one scream before it trails off into a wet squelch, the crumpled remains more like the food paste from her last meal than human. Discarding the leaking corpse with a wave of her hand, head buzzing with the tight grasp of the implant in her skull, she goes to work on his partner with a snarl. The blue white flare of biotics outlines her frame, and the armoured Turian comes apart like wet tissue paper. Dark blue blood splatters her face and chest, dripping down her tats and draping over her body like a sweater made of warm stinking guts. But that warmth is nothing compared to the rush, the roaring bonfire in her stomach as she rips the scumsucker's head off. The charnel smell's just something she's just that good at ignoring. The human she didn't give a flying fuck, just another dumb idiot too stupid to live. But the Turian was one of the ones Kurill tended to sic on her if she broke his toys. She had rules about that kind of thing.

Rule one. Always get even. Always.

The black, bulge eyed expression she gets kindles the warmest thing she's felt in what seems like a lifetime before it pops like a scaly grape. She can just imagine squishing Kurill's face now.

She sees the motion from the corner of her eye, tell tale signs of hostility that set off a hiss of a hate from her lips. Number three, another rule to follow. Always get them first before they can get you. Blue light swirls and a barrier is up before she even registers the muzzle flash of the remaining guard's rifle. A hail of bullets streak across the measly fifty feet in an eyeblink before flashing to a cold stop inches from her face and chest. A bloodless curl makes its way up her lips. This one's broken. Kurill wanted her alive after all. Screaming all her rage, she lets the Spider in her head claw at her brain, little steaming icicles of ghostly pain stabbing into the hindquarters of her consciousness. A light show envelops her, draining into her fist as she charges across the intervening space in wide bounds. A burst of biotic power, and she clips him on the head, blowing off the helmet to reveal a grizzled face behind it. The sap drops his rifle to clutch at his chest, jerking free a silvery knife. It's not one of the fat K-bars soldiers sometimes carry, but a long thin thing, with a cutting edge like a scalpel.

And suddenly she's a little girl again, back in the lab, in the surgical ward with the doctor.

The doctor doesn't introduce himself to her, not like the others. He doesn't have a name, just the title, 'doctor', the cold room with the bright lights, the shackling straps that hold her tight, and the knife. The cutting edge of a knife pressing, slicing, making tiny little incisions in her skull, peeling away skin, cutting through bone. She's conscious through it all, her nerves dead, but never asleep, every sensation there for her to feel in terrifying horror as it probes deeper and deeper. She tries to scream, but her gagged mouth refuses to budge, tries to struggle, to get away from the man with the knife, but the restraints bite down tight and prevent her even from shivering. And then there's the pinch at the base of her skull, clamping down on exposed flesh and bone, the burrowing thing she learns to call the Spider, digging into her mind like an unwelcome predator. It jostles her consciousness, an alien thing intruding on her awareness like a fat mouth breather sitting in your personal space. It's all of a second of an acquaintance, and she hates it, fears it with every fibre of her being.

But the Spider is power, sweet delicious nectar that floods every pore in her body, the tingling warmth of her superiority over every other thing. Blue fire she had struggled to ignite in bygone days comes like a snap, roaring with all the hate and pain she can stuff into it. She's faster, stronger, harder than everyone else who's ever wronged her, than every fucker in the universe. The guard's gone, but the doctor is still there. She doesn't see the blue and white armour he's wearing, the ashen face twisting into a snarl of defiance. She doesn't even register the hand going for the grenade pinned to his chest. All she sees is the doctor and the knife, ready to make that cut.

But she's not a helpless little girl anymore, begging in futility for the pain to stop. Never again. Never beg like a weakling. She **takes**.

The knife doesn't even come close to touching her. There's no form, no grace, just raw instinct and bloodlust as she twists away from the first thrust and ducks the second slash. And then she ends it with her fist slamming into armoured carapace like a bulk lifter, polymer and ceramic inlays crumpling like a wet paper bag. There's all a microsecond of a choked cry before physics comes back with a vengeance, splattering the doctor against the far wall with all the force of a mass accelerator round. She spends all of a heartbeat blinking as she finally recognizes the cracked armour plate he has on.

Not the doctor, the sadistic bastard's dead like every other fucker in Teltin. Just another ex-guard in Purgatory. Teeth gleam from beneath her sadistic grin. Bad memories or not, it's just one less obstacle to her freedom.

The annoying wail of klaxons pick up in pitch as something blows up behind her with a roar of flames, another stab at her ass end of a home for the past fuck knows how many years. Automated doors slam shut as fire suppressant systems activate, filling the room with a cold puffy white clouds. The hallway exit itself is sealed, hidden behind a double layered blast door of reinforced steel. She snarls with the energy of the scornfully defiant. Did they really think that would work?

The Spider skitters across the web of her consciousness, stabbing little icicles of venom and pain as it obeys her command. A good pain that encases her fist in a rioting halo of blue. But before she can tear down the offending barrier, the crackle of a radio catches her attention. She doesn't ignore it, not right away. She's pissed, but not stupid. It's from the helmet of the cretin she just pulped, squawking with a voice she knows so well.

_"Block D-1 is in lockdown. Squads Theta and Gamma, move in to secure Jack. Non lethal force only. Find and capture her!"_

She sneers. Non lethal force? What a bunch of weak kneed pussies. The only way anyone was going to get her now was with a fucking huge bomb. Not that she'd count on that working either. When she was through with Kurill, he'd be lucky if all that was left was a stain on the wall. But maybe not today, she can wait. Right now, the only thing that matters is getting out. Somebody had woken her up, left the Spider to run riot, and she didn't believe in accidents. That meant somebody was looking for her, busted her out of cryo, but she didn't give a damn as to who or why. Maybe it's Cerberus, maybe not. Didn't matter anyway. Anyone coming for her was a scumsucker out to kill or use her, too bad for them. She isn't going to be around when the place burns. She directs her sneer back at the blast door, thick bolts of reinforced steel alloys that would take a rocket head on and keep on standing. The Spider leaps.

Doors? **Fuck **doors.

* * *

The hallways echoed with the chatter of firearms, the roar of flames raging despite the feeble efforts of automated fire suppression systems, the banshee shriek of twisting metal and screams of rage and pain as the battle for the prison continued. Through this all, the armoured Turian walked on unhurriedly, the squad support weapon in his claws dwarfing the assault rifles in his flanking guards. Speed was important, but rushing now would only cost them situational awareness when things were starting to come apart.

_"We've got sector C-2, but we're pinned down and cannot hold! Requesting reinforcements!"_

Kurill was a lot of things, most of them generally unflattering, and quite a few contradictory depending on who you asked. A Blue Suns commander, Warden over the inmate populace of Purgatory, cold blooded Turian mercenary turned extortionist, and public service provider were among the few labels he had acquired over the years he'd gone into the business of wetwork for hire. That was just baggage, bits of debris that people tended to heap on old hands like him once they'd gotten around. But to himself, he was always, and would always be, a simple businessman, if one willing to get his hands a little dirtier than most. When some corporate wanted guns for hire to quash an upstart competitor, there he was, no questions asked. When a government needed a place to get rid of dangerous criminals, he was a happy supplier of that place, for the right price of course. Businessmen did not get by on charity cases after all.

_"Damnit, where are our reinforcements? We need backup now!"_

And like all successful businessmen, he knew how to gauge the risks and profit of any venture. Synthetic Insights had promised a kingly sum for the intact capture of the prototype AI chassis, much more than what Cerberus had offered for Jack's release. For that kind of money, risking his reputation as a '_fair'_dealer with his clients was well worth the trade off. And so long as he had Jack, who remained securely locked behind the most heavily reinforced cryogenic systems known to Citadel Space, Cerberus would have to forgive him anything. It had been, in his original estimation, a no-lose situation. However, the machine was rapidly proving to be a bigger drain on his resources than he had initially estimated. He had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and resources gathering all the information on the war machine's performance, crafting his plans around countering them. That had been accurate. But with the rest of its compatriots, his intelligence was less so. He'd expected professionals, Cerberus had no dead weight in its numbers as far as he knew. The Turian and Krogan were a surprise to find among the human supremacist organization. Unfamiliar faces to him, but they were operating like an elite assault unit who'd spent a lifetime training together. And seeing Zaeed's face working among them was a shock.

_"It's that damned mech! Get down, GET DO-"_

The legendary mercenary had shot to infamy when he'd brought down the Verrikan from the inside with just a handful of men, earning the reputation for someone who got the job done no matter how insane, but often at the cost of most of his squad. Strangely, none of the Cerberus operatives had died yet, which made his losses all the more frustrating. This could have been explained away by the fact that Zaeed _was not _in command, the synthetic intelligence was; which led to its own set of problems. From the video feeds, he watched it direct the troops under its command with the kind of fluid but brutal efficiency that bore little in common with the grinding and implacable onslaught of Geth tactics, bearing more than a passing resemblance to human ones instead. No wasted motions, near instant comprehension of orders and responses. The hero of the Citadel may have been dead and gone, but Cerberus had apparently not slacked in trying to replicate his tactical proficiency. He had already lost five times the men originally projected as sufficient to overwhelm the boarding team, and they had yet to neutralize the Cerberus liaison and her bodyguard, not to mention loss of the command centre. Kurill felt put out about that; he'd trained his men to repel that kind of heavy assault and it rankled his professional pride that they were being brushed aside so easily despite the advantages of territory, numbers and firepower on their side. Compared to the way things were rapidly deteriorating into however, it was a minor case of scale itch.

_"Damnit, there's too many of the prisoners! We can't hold them back! We-"_

Losing power had cost him much of shipboard security and his prisoner stock before the secondary fuel cells could come online. Even then, they only had the barest minimum of power available, just enough to run life support, lights and the doors. The engineering bay had reported entire power arrays slagged from overheat; sabotage they had claimed, before they'd been overrun by the prisoners. He'd taken drastic measures then, voiding several blocks including Engineering, hundreds of thousands of credits of valuable scum sent blowing out into hard vacuum, as an example of what would happen if they continued. It hadn't worked. They were too desperate to be held back by threats, counting on him not willing to sacrifice them all with heavy handed use of decompression since it would gut his lucrative business. Five minutes ago, they would have been even right. To an extent.

_"Gamma team here. We've spotted Jack, request permission to use lethal force."_

He flicked a mandible, activating his suits communication system for a micro burst transmission.

_"Denied."_

_"She's tearing us apart! We're getting slaugh-"_

Mandibles clacked in frustration as the transmission cut out with a burst of static. With the same amount of dispassionate ease, he tasked another assault group from his command omni-tool on an intercept vector. The corpse of Jack would be useless to him, but alive, she was worth so much more. With just her in custody, he could lose Purgatory and still recoup his losses. If he could not capture the machine Insights wanted, then at least he would still have Jack. The remaining Arc projector-equipped troops had been retasked with the role of hunting the escapee down and bringing her in one way or another, but he had his private doubts about their chances. What few command systems still responding to his tactical net were reporting over thirteen hull breaches, all of them caused within five minutes of Jack's unauthorized release from cryogenic suspension. The only silver lining in the whole matter was that Cerberus had yet to make contact with her, the reports on former indicating that they were in pursuit, but unable to catch up before running into another clutch of guards.

_"Hey asswipe._"

It wasn't an encrypted broadcast, but in clear, and on a wide band send. Someone wanted everyone to hear this. Kuril did not demand the identity of the person on the tactical net, nor did he berate them for insubordination. The automatic response had been strangled in the creche at the first syllable. That the IFF system tagged the unit responding as already killed in action had nothing to do with it. He knew that voice. Not unexpected.

_"Jack."_

A part of him wanted to strangle the destructive ball of hate, but like all the other unprofitable impulses he had in the past, he pushed it down and kept his voice civil, if condescending.

_"I'm coming for you, you Drell fucking piece of Vorcha shit, and when I'm done, there's not going to be even a smear."_

"How generous."

A pack of prisoners rounded the corner and spotted him, howling with fury as they pounded forward with a variety of improvised or stolen weapons in their hands. Kurill unhurriedly put his weapon to his shoulder, letting his upgraded kinetic barriers absorb the occasional hit that connected without flinching, and pulled the trigger. His return fire was much more effective. The entire exercise took less than a second to clear and by then he had formulated his response to the biotic while he strode past the corpses. _"But I have a better offer, seeing how you have nowhere to go. Return to your cell block, and I'll let you keep one leg. And maybe an arm if I'm in a good mood."_

He preferred to avoid maiming his stock when he could, such things tended to lower their value as incentives for governments to pay for their imprisonment. But sometimes a stronger example than just beatings needed to be made, to keep the inmates properly docile. The response was a snarl of scorn and hate, peppered with some colourful language that made his mandibles twitch in amusement at her imagination. An intense ball of hate stronger than any Krogan grudge and biotics powerful enough to tear through bulkheads made Jack a very powerful enemy to have. He didn't wait for the litany to die down before he interrupted her.

_"Or perhaps I'll just let you be reunited with certain quarters who want to see you again very badly_."

There was a stream of inventive invectives before the channel died in a squeal of static.

He motioned for his guards to pick up the pace. Jack was angry, and she was desperate now that she knew what he did. Desperation drove most sentients into a very limited series of objectives, and for all her bluster, he knew the kind of creature she was. What she would seek first and foremost had already been well accounted for. He cycled through the available channels, hovering over a one time encryption key he'd never planned on using but kept all the same. Only a handful of his most trusted men had the necessary decryption protocols, the rest would have to find their own way. He activated the key, and spoke only two words.

_"Do it."_

* * *

Chaos surrounded Shepard, the familiar lack of order descending into anarchic violence in an cacophonous display of smoke, fire, screams and full automatic fire. It was starting to seem that no matter where he went, it would always be the same. Death and destruction slavishly followed in his footsteps, leaving nothing behind but ruin. Noveria, Eden Prime, Omega, even the vaunted safety of the Citadel. The scenery changed, but never the outcome.

Today, Purgatory burned.

He found it difficult not to find dark amusement in that particular knowledge as he stepped over the remnants of a blue armoured corpse, the cadaver having been torn apart not by firearms, but the fists and feet of desperate prisoners. For all the promises of the priests and preachers of an afterlife of one flavour or another, his meeting with the reaper had not introduced him to any incarnation of the sort. Death had lacked a place of torments and judgment that the religious spoke of, but life had given him one. That it was quickly turning into a classical depiction of hell, with fire and death in its halls... it brought a tendril of amusement to his jaded mind. Cerberus's Frankenstein project might have robbed him of a body, but it had given him a fresh viewpoint for the symbolically ironic.

Not that he had anything to do with the ongoing destruction of the space borne prison. Well, not _entirely_. The effects of _his _plan had plunged the station into the temporary darkness of total power failure, and though backups did exist to combat such an event, they were not as well protected from external intrusion as the primary systems had been. It had only been emergency reporting systems and such, but they were a vulnerability all the same. EDI had seized control of most of the command systems the moment they were reactivated, circumventing firewalls and transferring administrator privileges in the brief window of time they were exposed. Establishing communications with Miranda's team once the jamming system had been disabled was easily accomplished, but there had been complications. Though only the most direct threats, the automated sentry guns and security mechs, had been disabled, it had not taken very long for the prisoners to realize a never-to-be-repeated opportunity and broken confinement en-masse. They were unarmed and unarmoured, going against a security contingent of heavily armed guards with only their superior numbers to assail the mercenaries fortifications. The conclusion was a foregone one.

It did not take very long before the first hull breach was reported, with the loss of all hands in that sector.

All for the sake of a rampaging biotic.

As if the thought conjures her presence, the interior rings with the shriek of steel being tormented beyond all tolerance, shearing apart as some part of the ship in the distance is rent asunder by an unstoppable force. He knows it is the bulkhead giving way, a violent remodelling of the interior to produce new doors where once there was solid steel. The towering rage of a sociopath imprisoned but now free, bending local reality for the sole purpose of destruction. He knows all of this, because they have already borne witness to the destruction left in her wake. His squad, already used to the ear splitting sounds of destruction, do not falter, the Turian only pausing in his advance to share an inscrutable look from behind the opaque visor of his helmet. He couldn't see what was behind the mask, couldn't catch the twist to his mandibles or raised eyeplate, but neither was required to decipher the unspoken question.

_Was what you did that back there, all of that, really necessary?_

He didn't answer, at least not right away, other than to wave his arm in a forward gesture. Fresh gunfire crackled as doors opened to spill forth a platoons worth of blue suns, assault rifles chattering. His squad went to cover, questions forgotten as Garrus dives behind the ruins of a collapsed cell transfer crane. Too large to take advantage of the chest height obstructions, Shepard waded forward, autocannon in his arm snarling a reply. Marching in lockstep with him was Okeer's legacy, swaddled in thick armour and the even thicker hide of his race, shotgun at the ready. Blue armoured forms staggered as they were stitched with a storm of metal, flinging them to the ground in boneless heaps. He fought on, but the question niggled at his mind.

It was redundant to ask. Necessity guided his actions, defined the man that he was. He always weighed the scales, made the choices that provided the best results for all concerned. If horror and cruelty was the only way in the time they had, then he would do so. They had made their decisions, so had he. Releasing Jack from cryo stasis while the situation was fluid was a gamble, but he had two very good reasons for taking the risk. They required a distraction to keep the forces separated, and it would be an effective test of her capabilities. If she survived, it would prove she had the power and mettle they needed for the task ahead. He loathed to use people that way, but the logic behind it was necessary. Even with the dossiers, Jack was an unknown and volatile equation, testing her now would gauge her effectiveness later. But doubts still lingered, and not only at the calculative reasons.

They were both agents of the law, Garrus in C-Sec and him as an Alliance marine. Former in both cases, but the oaths they had taken did not end with their service. The blue suns were mercenaries, their calling was money, not the law, not the governments they hailed from, and certainly not justice. But they had guarded a prisoner, no doubts as to her crimes there, one they were helping escape from well deserved incarceration. Her biotic potential was off the scale, both in the reports he had read and the evidence that lay strewn about the collapsing ship. He had seen the remains of the YMIR assault platforms, crumpled like clay men within a prizefighter's fist. Miranda and Jacob, the only two biotics in his crew, could not even begin to compare. Their need was great, nothing could be held back in the fight against the Reapers. The best of the best, every bullet, ship, and resource available to be marshaled to fight the coming tide of extinction, no matter its origins.

Subject Zero was a diminutive package of unparallelled biotic fury who could throw over thirty thousand Newtons worth of force, four times greater than the next best human on record, more than enough to crumple steel bars like empty soda cans. No matter their reservations, that kind of power was an asset they could use. A power that they desperately needed to fight the Reaper's Collector pawns. But the thoughts are an unwanted distraction, even if they are not affecting his combat performance; they are committed, and there is no place for doubts here. The crackle of his tactical communications net reminds him of that.

_"You know, this makes no sense Shepard." _

_"WHAT"_The reply is cursory, his attention focused on the nimble guard who avoided the first fusillade and is now making a getaway. He does not take his second step before a rifle cracks with lethal finality, blood erupting from his chest as his body pitches into the ground before lying still. From the corner of his vision, Shepard caught the suggestion of a shrug from the grizzled Turian as he ducked back behind the shelter of an upright steel plate. With the momentary respite, he rapped the construction with his free hand.

_"This. Pop up barriers in the middle of a nice wide and open kill zone like this? It's like they want to make things easy for us."_

Shepard would have smirked at the sardonic tone if he still had lips, his earlier introspection forgotten. Garrus always did have a knack for understating things. The plates had been a bit of a surprise when they had first encountered them in the prison wings, thick slabs of armoured steel seamlessly flush against the deck, snapping to position via powerful magnetic clamps at just the right height to shelter a roughly human sized person if they ducked. Since they were controlled by the security system, he could see the logic behind evenly spaced shelters you could deploy on command. Except with communications restored, security was EDI's plaything, the artificial intelligence subverting the automated shelters for their benefit and denying it to their enemies. He didn't know how well they would have stood up to conventional omni-tool hacks, but given how woefully prepared they were for heavy electronic warfare attacks, he decided that Garrus had a point after all.

_"NOT THAT THEY NEED TO" _He punctuated his observation with a burst of cannon fire, the stream of projectiles flaring against the barriers of a guard and knocking him down behind a fallen girder.

_"Well if it's too easy for you commander, I'm sure we'll find something suitably challenging for you soon enough,"_ Piped in another voice on the tactical net, the ID tag telling him what he already knows from the arch, slightly annoyed voice. So much for the unofficial small truce with the Cerberus liaison_. _Miranda had been rather peeved to learn how the insertion attempt had almost gone bad, much less being ordered back to the Normandy with Jacob, though she kept her disapproval reined in_. _Neither one had worn environmentally sealed armour to avoid tipping off their hand early, while most of their contingency plans required them. _"Seeing how those arc projectors they're using don't seem to be up to your standards, perhaps riding out the impending re-entry would be more to your tastes."_

Mostly reined in._  
_  
Garrus chuckled_, _unhooking a flashbang from his harness,_ "Thanks, but I'll pass on that. Shepard's the one for crazy rides. Word of advice; _**never **_let him drive. Especially if it's a Mako." _

For once, he was glad at his machine body's inability to reproduce contextual sounds outside of human grammar or he would have groaned as yet another voice added his two credits.

_"You mean the Mako IFV?"_ the grizzled voice of Zaeed queried, a hint of curiosity in his voice as he stepped past a ventilated corpse, pausing only long enough to give it a swift kick. _"Never been in one, but damned bloody tough things I remember. Take a hell of a beating and they just keep on going. Hear they have shitty suspension though, half the time they get called vomit comets because it was bloody bouncing all over the place."_

_"NOT THAT BAD,"_he refuted a little defensively, ignoring the chuckles of the ex-vigilante and turning his attention and grenade launcher to where the guard had fallen. Thermal sensors illuminated the hidden form, pencil-thin beams of coherent light feeding distance calculations into the micro-warhead as the weapon on his shoulder barked. The roar of its incendiaries detonating over the barrier is joined by the tormented cry of a newly-ignited human torch.

_"Not that bad? Come on Shepard, you were a complete maniac behind the wheel." _The Turian accompanied his rebuttal with a backhand toss of the flashbang towards the last gaggle of guards._ "Calling it a vomit comet was an understatement when you drove. How many Alliance Marines can claim to have made it cartwheel off a sheer drop, bounce off a cliff face, only to land on that pirate crawler? I swear the thing would have fallen apart after only one mission with you."_

Shepard refrained from answering immediately as his optics dimmed to compensate for the sudden eruption of light and sound, feeling a bit offended. Yes, he had pushed the armoured fighting vehicle hard, and the ride was sometimes uncomfortable between dodging anti-tank fire and navigating harsh terrain, but they'd all come through, more or less intact despite the incredible odds stacked against them. The complaints, he felt, were somewhat unjustified. _"EVERYONE SURVIVED."_

_"Not that survival was much of a blessing if it meant another drop like that. Why do you think I was always running maintenance on it?"_ The sardonic reply was punctuated by a short staccato beat of Garrus's battle rifle. At the end of the hall, a guard threw down his ruined shotgun with a curse, darting for the holstered pistol at his side. Another triple beat, and the mercenary fell with a spray of arterial blood. _"Besides, remember the Geth colossus? The one you ran over?"_

The mercenary actually paused in mid-fire, retaining the presence of mind to duck behind cover before shooting an incredulous look at Shepard. _"Wait. A Geth colossus? Bloody huge walking tank? You're bleeding pulling my leg."_

Powering through a deployable barrier with his bulk, Shepard slew the idle thought of sending a warning shot at Garrus as he continued to elaborate.

_"A lucky hit had taken out the main gun, so instead of pulling back to fix it, he charges straight ahead. Fishtailed into it right as it was turning around to hit us, knocked out half its support legs." _Garrus rose to his feet, snapping off another accurate burst of fire before dashing forward. Several steps later, he slid behind a piece of debris, nonchalantly continuing as if he wasn't being shot at. "_The platform went down hard at that point, clipped the Mako with its backside. One thing about that vehicle, the suspension really likes to bounce. It sent us flipping across the landscape. Longest ten seconds of my life. By the time we came to a stop, I was ready to call it quits."_

He chuckled as Shepard scoured the remaining strongpoints with a withering storm of steel. "_Only sheer luck we ended up on our wheels rather than upside down. But just as the synthetic starts to get up again, Shepard guns the engine and drives up its back like a ramp before parking right on top of it. Between the Geth's flailing and Shepard lighting off the thrusters on its head, we're getting tossed around inside like a bunch of marbles. And would you believe it, he's laughing all the while._"

_"YOU DID NOT COMPLAIN THEN." _Were they not in the middle of a firefight, and had he better control over the amount of strength put in his motor controls, Shepard would probably have given into the impulse to chastise Garrus with a smack across the back of the head for bringing up the incident. Instead, he vented his frustrations by lighting off another missile from his arm launcher, blasting apart the last of the holdouts while Grunt charged into their midst. Yes, it had happened the way Garrus described, but it had made sense at the time!

_"I think we were more concerned about checking to see if we were still alive after that stunt, commander." _He interjected above the bark of his rifle.

_"You talk too much Turian." _Grunt's disapproving rumble carried above the crack of armour plate as he drove his fist into the chest of the last guard. The blow sent him slamming against the bulkheads with enough force to leave a dent, his chest plate crumpled inwards._ "Your warlord brings you to glorious victory in battle and you complain of discomfort? Weak."  
_  
_"Oh, you haven't experienced his driving yet." _There was the tiniest pause where Shepard could visualize the twitch of mandibles behind a helmet, the Turian equivalent of a grin. _"It would be... instructive."_

Slewing his sensor pod towards the ex-vigilante, Shepard fixed him with the hardest stare he could muster with its optics. It was conceding the point, but he was a man without a body dammit. He was entitled to preserving at least a shred of his dignity._ "DO YOU WANT ME TO PILOT THE GUNSHIP ON THE NEXT DROP_"

It was petty, but the way the Turian's head snapped towards him in shock was very satisfying. _"Isn't that against Citadel and Systems Alliance law, commander? I think they classified it as cruel and unusual punishment."_

He regretted not being able to grin, settling for shifting his arm servos in the analogue of a shrug. _"NOT IN THE MILITARY ANY MORE. THIS IS A CERBERUS OPERATION. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS LIKE._"

_"Commander, as amusing as it is to hear of your past exploits, might I remind you that we are short on time as it is," _Miranda's voice on the tactical net carried no small amount of irritation as she interrupted Garrus's response, _"Purgatory's orbit is rapidly decaying and Subject Zero is still a-."_ Her words were suddenly cut off by the toneless and unhurried voice of EDI.

_"Shepard, I am detecting the simultaneous launch of Purgatory's escape pods. Sensor contacts indicate that they comprise the entirety of Purgatory's complement."_

A few curses flitted through the communications net, the guttural oath from Zaeed losing itself in the Grunt's growl of frustration at the 'cowards', but Shepard only asked one question of the synthetic intelligence.

_"LIFE SIGNS"_

Purgatoy's primary thrusters were down, its reactor cores scrammed and would stay that way for days with only the on board resources at hand. The secondary fuel cells had been slagged, forced to overload by a pulsed override command even as they warmed up. Not all of them, enough just to leave life support and the barest of functions running. For a little while longer. Anyone in the Engineering bays would know from their data readouts and the red hot pools of chemical sludge that were their secondaries. Cold-starting the main reactors was impossible. Caught in Olokun's gravity well, its hours-long death spiral had already begun, and would terminate in the crushing grasp of the gas giant. Abandoning ship was the only sensible thing to do, about the only option left if you intended to live to see the next day. At least, the only option he wanted the inhabitants of Purgatory to believe with EDI's more subtle manipulations of the control systems.

Frankenstein's creation he might be, but Shepard was not yet a complete monster.

But coordinated mass launches like this were an unexpected variable, there was no practical sense to delaying the pods until everyone was filled. Assuming they were filled. EDI's answer came a moment later, confirming his suspicions.

_"None. They are empty."_

Shepard had never been one for profanity, no matter how bad things had gotten. Profanity was an emotional outlet, but pointless for resolving problems. It did not lessen the urge to blister the air with Kurill's name, like now. He accelerated, moving down the trail of destruction that Jack had left behind. It had to be a part of the Warden's plan, that meant they didn't have-

A detonation rocked the entire ship, the superstructure groaning in protest as the prison bucked and heaved. Internal gyros whined as they struggled to keep his balance in the sudden upheaval, his team scrabbling to stay upright even as the floor panels buckled beneath them. Screaming filled the air, but not from those who had accompanied him. Wall-mounted isolation modules high above were knocked loose by the detonation, tearing free into gravity's grasp. Prisoners still trapped inside shrieked as their prisons smashed themselves into pulp on the unyielding floor, or were cracked open to unforgiving vacuum while fires bloomed from shattered life support pipes, plumes of igniting oxygen scorching the walls.

But the all-consuming explosion he expected never came.

_"STATUS" _he demanded the moment the aftershocks subsided, receiving a number of affirmative check ins on the tactical net. And one jibe.

_"Hey commander, was that your idea? Because, you totally got the sequence wrong you know? When you blow up the ship, you're supposed to be in the escape pods, and not inside getting blown to bits. That's how it's done in the action holos."_

If he had eyes, he would have rolled them at Joker._ "NOT MY IDEA JOKER" _He had a pretty good idea who's idea it was, though the knowledge was not very comforting. He had miscalculated. From the amount of opposition that had been thrown up to intercept his group, he was expecting that the Warden would have tried to force a confrontation, possibly harbouring the hopes that he could still capture him. He should have expected the possibility it was a feint. He hadn't expected _this. _

_"Uh yeah. That probably makes sense. You're crazy, but not __**that **__crazy. Might want to hurry it up a bit then. The Purgatory's port fuel storage tanks just went up all at once, nearly tore her in half. Thermal's showing a lot of heat signatures going on inside too, looks like fire containment's on the fritz. The way things are going, starboard tanks might go up any minute too. If that happens, it's really going to bring down the resale value."_

Another lesser explosion rocked the ship, underscoring Joker's words as the perfectly calm voice of the Purgatory's shipboard VI announced the loss of life support in several decks.

_"Definitely not the kind of thing you want to see up close."_

Bulkheads and blast doors were no obstacle to her, ripped from their mountings or just powered through with all the fury of the Spider scuttling in her brain. Prisoners and guards alike she blew apart or crushed with equal contempt, never stopping, never slowing, but getting no closer to her goal. Another explosion tore through the prison ship, a blast of fire consuming some screaming guards before she brought a containment module down on their annoying heads like the hammer of Jack. Thumping down the hallway, she rounded on the alcove leading to the escape pods, giving no more attention to the prisoners beating on its sealed door than she would a buzzing insect. And like insects, she swatted them aside, stumping past their broken bodies to check the pod launch controls. She spent all two seconds looking at the readout before screaming in frustration.

Fuck. _Fuck. __**Fuck**_the Warden. The bastard was crazier than she'd given him credit for. Purgatory was getting blown to shit. That was good. About time it got what was coming. Except there weren't any escape pods, and that was fucking kick to the cunt. It was the same fucking thing with every pod she'd come across, all launched, none left, and the fucking ship about two steps from finishing the job of blowing itself to bits. She was damned sure she'd gotten to the pods ahead of the guards and rest of the prisoners a few times, but those were gone too. She wanted to grin despite her rage. The sadistic bastard had finally decided to take her seriously, blowing up the ship and her with it.

There had to be a way out. She fucking refused to give up like this. Rule three. Someone always fucked up, kill him before he can unfuck himself. Jack wasn't stupid, she knew her freedom had been somebody doing rule three. The guards were too well trained to fuck up like that, so that meant somebody else, probably those 'concerned quarters' the Warden had let slip. That meant they had come looking for her, probably set her loose. Didn't matter whether it was an accident or on purpose, but that meant they were probably fucking up the Warden's shit, and more importantly, they had a ship.

Jack didn't buy into that 'enemy of my enemy' crap. Looking out for yourself was _the_rule. Everyone else has an angle, looking to screw you over. They had a ship, likely a shuttle in the only hanger bay on this rustbucket, and that meant she had a ticket out.

She just had to make sure she killed them all first.

* * *

Jack felt, rather than saw or heard the ambush ahead of her. It was impossible to miss because it was that fucking obvious. The hanger bay doors were sealed, and she bet there were a mess of guards on the other side with heavy weapons, waiting to screw her in the ass the moment she came through. The Warden was a crazy bastard, but she wasn't dumb enough to think that he was a stupid one. If the sack of shit hadn't made his getaway by now, he would be waiting there to try and snatch her, a ton of his best guards with shock sticks, rifles and everything in between. She smiled a feral grin at that, all teeth, malice and the promise of sweet, sweet revenge. Well fuck him sideways with a Krogan power fist too.

She walked down the hallway, tapping the walls periodically until things squared with the mental map in her head. She'd seen the interior of the hanger once, when they'd brought her in. Like every other place she'd come across, she'd kept all the important details in that corner of her mind labelled 'escape routes and weak points'. And right now, she needed a weak point right where she could kick the bastard in his scaly balls. She stopped walking at a junction, just another featureless corridor of panelled walls and floors, at least, that was how it would look like to anybody else. To her, it was perfect. The floor fell away as she fed the Spider all her hate and rage, the other presence in her mind encasing her body with solid blue fire. With an ear splitting howl, she hurled herself at the wall, punching through screeching bulkheads like a freight train through wet waste paper.

The bulkhead tore open in an explosive shower of deadly debris as she rammed through them, a particularly large chunk flattening some schmuck in blue before he could even turn. But there were a lot more figures in blue with guns, and a few of them had already started shooting. Jack didn't waste a second, pulling at some of the debris with a flick of her mind and sending the rest of it scattering into the hanger bay. Two heartbeats later, and a chunk of steel the size of an aircar slammed into the closest bunch of guards like a freight train. The rest scattered and dove for cover as the rest of the former wall hurtled their way. It wasn't much, but it was enough for her to land on the crane without taking a shot up the ass. She didn't pause to admire her handiwork, only stupid idiots did that, but scuttled along the crane's loading arm, pausing only to grab a loose fuel tank and slam it into a cluster of guards who tried their luck with potshots over their makeshift cover. Their screams as the tank broke and ignited sent up a warm feeling in her belly.

_"You feeling that, you bastards?"_

She jumped, tearing down the crane behind her in a shower of sparks. The container in its grasp broke free, the improvised missile crushing a gaggle of guards with an almighty crash as it came down on their heads. She landed a moment later on the twisted pile of scrap and rolled with the impact, bouncing to her feet before the rest could correct their aim. She spent all of a heartbeat swivelling her head left and right, looking for the scaly shit who ran this miserable hell hole and finding nothing. She scowled at that. The Warden was somewhere around here, too many of his goons to be anything else. Well, she had the answer for that.

"Come out you asswipe!" the ex-convict howled as she tore through another cluster of guards, bowling them over with a blast of dark energy and smearing a few across the floor like crushed fruit for good measure. Assault rifles chattered and shotguns roared, storms of flechettes halting just inches from her face as the Spider hissed and webbed them. She sent them back, with exploding canisters for interest. One of them had a rocket launcher, she blinked at that, giving him points for having the balls to use it inside a ship. And then she took his balls away with a well aimed throw of torn piping. The improvised spear punched through his kinetic barriers and pinned him to the wall where he flopped like a dying fish. His screams were music to her ears.

There were at least thirty more moving bodies in blue with guns. She had no armour and no weapons. But she didn't need either. The Spider was a weapon, the Spider was loose, and so was all the cargo in the hanger, this was her playground now. Flechettes and grenades were met with the Spider's web, never touching her. She flailed with her power in broad sweeping strokes, slamming armoured figures into unyielding walls with resounding crunches. A gesture with her forefinger, and a head popped clean off the neck it was attached to. A wordless snarl, and a man was torn from limb to limb. But they weren't _him._

"Come out and fucking die already!"

A sudden burst of fire caught her attention, a hail of flechettes sparking off the floor just in front of her.

"So nice to see that you're punctual, Jack."

That was when she saw him emerging from an opened cargo container, that smug flare to his mandibles making her blood boil. Turians all looked the same to her, but she made it a point to memorize that distinctive face paint, and that oily bastard voice. How convenient that he had gone without a helmet so she could find him easily. Even better, he was standing next to a shuttle with its engines primed and ready for takeoff. She grabbed a loading crate and tossed it at him, but the bastard was faster than she had accounted for, ducking under the missile before snapping off a few rounds. They slammed into her barriers harder than the other times she had been shot at. The Spider chittered under the strain of holding it up, exacting its toll with a pulsing migraine.

"Be a good prisoner and be so kind as to drop on the floor." He responded laconically between bursts of fire. "I'd prefer to have you undamaged... permanently that is."

She howled and lunged forward, biotically kicking off a shattered support for better acceleration. That was when the Warden tapped a button beside his rifle, and the underslung barrel barked.

Two disc-like objects whizzed towards her, slamming into the shield of dark energy she had drawn up at the last instant. One moment was all it took for her to recognize them, and she raised her hands protectively. That was when the world went white, and all thought became impossible except for an infuriated, _'Fuck, my eyes!''_

But she didn't go down, and didn't stop, clinging on with all the stubbornness she could muster with her fury. She didn't need her eyes to use the Spider. She didn't even need them to navigate, she remembered where everything was well enough. Then the pain hit her. It felt like kissing a live wire, every muscle in her body jerked and spasmed as she danced to the electric tune. Her mouth opened to howl in fury, but all that came out was a strangled cry of pain and frustration. Every part of her body didn't want to respond to her rage no matter how she forced it.

Blinded, deafened, immobile. Helpless for the Warden to scoop up. Vulnerable.

Jack managed to scream at that thought, biting down on that pain and riding it like a brutal lover. She'd faced worse than this, she'd lived worse than this, she wouldn't give up like a fucking pansy. By sheer force of will, she clamped down on the Spider, squeezing it to do as she willed. The swirling pulse of biotic power filled her, not to strike out, but encasing her limbs with a suit of dark energy. Nerveless fingers that refused to clench surrendered to the constricting aura of light, limbs bending to her will. She was going to make them pay, every single fu-

Another live wire struck her chest and she screamed at the pain, the swirling corona of energies around her fist trebling as spasms racked her body. The Spider chittered, nearly squirming out of her grasp as her control over her biotics faltered. But she held on, howling as she strangled the Spider into submission. Dark energy flared and pulsed, sending everything not nailed down flying. Guards yelled with panic, music to her ears that encouraged her to press on. She got shocked again for her resistance, twice in rapid succession, nearly dropping her to her knees as her body writhed under the assault. The Spider slipped it's leash, skittering away into the darkness for one horrible second before she wrestled it back. But her hold was tenuous, nearly failing from the overwhelming pain. Rifles chattered, and her barriers flickered, barely stopping the bullets while the Spider screamed in agony.

But she clamped down on the torment, hanging on by sheer fury alone. The pain was nothing, _**nothing**_compared to the torture Cerberus had put her through. She would survive. And she was going to make them pay.

Every single fucking one.

* * *

Things go wrong. Plans run into unexpected circumstances, invalidating previously held assumptions and viable courses. To the cynical minded, nothing is more natural, no situation more normal, than everything ending all fouled up. In that same mindset, nothing is more unnatural than a plan working to perfection the first time, a flawless operation without hitch, last second improvisation or just plain luck to stave off disaster. As a corollary, the more complex a plan you make, the greater the probability that not only will something go wrong, that it will do so in a big way. With that in mind, Shepard had gone with simple objectives and crafted his strategy accordingly. The original goals, should the Warden prove hostile, had been to take control of the ship's systems, find Jack, release her from cyro-stasis, give her the twenty second run down under fire, reactivate her implants and fight their way to the extraction point through the pre-plotted route while Joker fended off Purgatory's defenses _and _its fighter escort long enough to launch a recovery craft.

That had been the _optimistic _plan. So of course it went wrong.

Between Jack's rapid exit before they could link up, the mass launch of empty escape pods and the, likely deliberate, detonation of the fuel tanks now threatening the entire ship, that plan, not to mention Plans B through D were now obsolete, E had insufficient preparation time to make it work, and F was little more than making it up on the fly with a few educated guesses. The good news was, they knew where Jack would most likely be heading with all other avenues of escape cut off. The bad news was, the Warden would be waiting there with whatever remained of his troops, heavy weapons and prepared ambush positions. And given her pace, there was no way they could link up with the convict before she ran headlong into the ambush.

She would last a while, he had no doubt about that given what he had seen in her passing. But biotics had limits, and the Warden had captured her before. Even if she destroyed the ambush before they arrived, she'd likely escape on whatever means Kurill had stashed away and they would lose their last opportunity. Haste had become the only priority, they had to find Jack before it was too late, even if it meant making a direct assault into enemy fire.

To be fair, he had been expecting weapons fire to greet him the moment he breached the hanger bay doors. Getting struck by a screaming mechanical missile was not among the things he had been accounting for.

It happened in an instant. The hanger doors had been sealed shut, the controls locked out. So they had been blasted open with breaching charges, his team pushing through the instant the doors came apart. He was the first through the breach, trusting to his shields and armour to absorb the expected attack. And then the projectile was there, howling scrap code as it blew past the smoke and headed for his head.

Automated threat detection routines registered the threat in under a microsecond, and kinetic barriers flared to life at the speed of light. The white and black form of an armoured FENRIR mech struck the barrier, coronas of dark energy flashed and rippled dangerously for an instant as conflicting shield systems tried to cancel each other out. A lightweight human form LOKI type security mech would have been instantly bowled over at the sudden impact even had it been shielded. But a YMIR assault class mech was a stable platform, more than a ton of armour, servos and power systems supported by thick sturdy legs. Against the thrown two hundred kilo mass of the doglike mech, it would barely have stumbled. With it's kinetic barriers, even one as battered as his, it would have been a negligible nuisance. But he was no creation of silicon and quartz, no coolly calculating machine intelligence. Despite everything that had been suppressed or stripped out, he was still at the core, human, and reacted as only an organic could.

Shepard flinched, over a ton of heavily armoured machine falling back a step as the doglike machine crumpled against his barriers and exploded.

The detonation was the final push, his kinetic barriers collapsing in the face of flensing shrapnel. They rattled off his body, thick armour plate proof against the improvised missile. But his sensor pod was less well protected. A spear of twisted metal the length of a human arm punched through the protective glass, smashing the camera feeds. The hanger bay disappeared behind a storm of white static before blacking out entirely. Threat alerts blared in his consciousness of incoming fire even as the world vanished. His shields sparked and sizzled as they tried to initialize while a barrage of fire hammered into his armour, system warnings droning of imminent catastrophic breaches. Despite being in the middle of battle, he couldn't help but hold just one grimly amused thought. At least he wasn't beheaded this time. But with the initiative lost, blinded and caught in the open, he should have died there and then.

If he had been alone.

_"Fire in the hole!"_

From behind his sheltering bulk, Garrus's under rifle attachment thumped, a dark projectile arcing high into the hanger before it erupted as a newborn star. Incoming fire slacked off and pained cries rang out from all around as his tactical net, unhindered by the loss of the sensor pod, fed him Grunt and Zaeed's positions. The mercenary and the Krogan swept out into the bay, their weapons thundering as they immediately began cutting down the most obvious threats. A moment later, sight returned, emergency protocols building a composite image from the cameras embedded into the helmets of his team, layering the data over uploaded plans and hijacked security footage to feed directly into his brain. The feed was distorted, disorientating from the odd way the angles appeared, but it was enough. He raised his arms, a veritable arsenal spitting death at blue armoured forms as he tried to pinpoint their objective.

She was there, out in the open and impossible to miss. A hurricane of metal and debris surrounded her with a cloud of whirling death as she flung parts of it at anything her sights fell on. He felt as moment of relief at the sight. Not captured, still an effective, her combat potential confirmed as worth all the trouble they were going through to get her.

_"OBJECTIVE LOCATED. PATTERN ALPHA."_

Alpha was as simple tactical manoeuvre. Stay in pairs, move fast, and keep enemy positions suppressed while rear elements neutralized them with heavy weapons. As the most obvious target, his job was to draw enemy attention and the Blue Suns went along with his plans amiably.

Enemy fire that had slacked a moment ago returned in full force, slamming into his newly-reinitialized shields with a desperate tempo. He pivoted to the side and accelerated, moving towards a pile of shattered cargo containers for shelter while his arm-mounted autocannon roared in defiance. The stuttering roar overshadowed the chatter of assault rifles, forcing blue armoured figures to dive behind cover as he swept withering fire at their positions. Return fire sparked off his armour whenever the stream of shots passed them by, the mercenaries jumping out when they were in the clear. Minor damage alerts began intruding on his awareness as the fire picked up, more defenders focusing their efforts on him. Taking advantage of the lack of attention, Garrus's rifle barked twice in quick succession, each shot punching through the helmet of a less than cautious mercenary while Zaeed vaulted over the cover of a sheltering Sun. The shotgun in his hand bucked, silencing the surprised cry as the veteran brutally smashed in the head of another guard with its butt. A moment's hesitation gripped the enemy forces as they split off their fire, long enough for a nest of guards to promptly disappear in a ball of flame when Shepard's missile struck.

Attention immediately fell back on him.

Through it all, he kept advancing, dividing his attention between Jack and the Suns. The former was still paying attention solely to the mercenaries, using her biotics to smash them with gravity and thrown containers. The latter were slowly falling back, unable to hold their positions between the two forces, but where was the Warden? He had to be somewhere- his attention suddenly swerved back to the convict. The motion was slight compared to the chaos of battle, so much so that he would have missed it had he been slightly less attentive. Jack had raised her arm. And it was pointed at him.

There was no time to think, only to react. The shoulder-mounted grenade launcher swivelled into position just as a wave of dark energy manifested around the convict. Fast as he was, she was faster. The blue aura flared and lanced out like an arrow. Deck plates warped and burst apart as the wave engulfed them, forming a line of destruction straight for him. The grenade launcher barked trice in rapid succession. Arming safeties overridden, contact fused high explosive rounds met the edge of the wavefront. Thin skinned metal housings twisted and broke, setting off their payloads. Concussive force and pulses of dark energy warred in a roiling cloud of blue tinged fire, the blast rocking Shepard back on his heels with a whine of abused actuators.

A heartbeat later, the convict burst through the cloud of flame, trailing an aura of biotic energy and murder in her eyes as she raised a corona engulfed fist. The same fist he had seen her drive through solid steel moments earlier.

"JACK-"

He never finished his words as the convict came in swinging. Training kicked in, and he evaded, sidestepping her biotic lunge with a quick shift of his body weight. The right arm swung, jabbing at her exposed flanks with the tips of his gun sheathes, but the convict reacted faster. An elbow jammed into the exposed muzzle of the rocket launcher in his arm, tearing apart the hardened alloys with a sudden flare of biotics and shower of sparks. Power to the limb immediately failed as emergency cutoffs engaged. She pivoted, sweeping a leg out that would have, should have, smashed itself uselessly against his armoured legs. Seeing the flare of biotics, he turned with her kick before it could connect, the limb whistling against the air too close for comfort.

"WE ARE-"

"Fuck you!"

The blue pulse of biotics around her frame gave him only a split second warning. Actuators whined in protest, compacting his frame even as the pulse caught him. Gravity inverted, gained momentum and sent his multi ton bulk flying. He slammed against the bulkheads with a deafening shriek of crumpling hullplate. Motive power to his internal gyro failed, the system locking down his legs as it underwent an emergency reboot. So much for making contact, was the wry thought that flitted in his awareness between the cascade of error reports. Jack advanced, screaming as the flare of biotically created barriers stopped incoming fire from so much as scratching her. Time to do it the old-fashioned way then.

_"EDI-"_

The convict lunged, her fist glowing with blue fire as she aimed it right at his chest. Time seemed to slow down.  
_  
"SHUT-"_

Internal sensors, those not already destroyed in his mangled head, painted the distance. Close.

_"OFF-"_

Too close. Half a meter to go. On his tactical display, Garrus's icon flickered with movement, the Turian rapidly approaching his position to assist. But the conclusion was obvious. He would never make it. Her fist began to come down where it would terminate against his chest. It would go through, punch into his brain casing. There wasn't enough time.

_"HER-"_

The fist crossed another twenty centimetres. He'd die.

But not today.

Power hissed from his microfusion core, dumping nearly it's entire output into the single remaining functional limb. Actuators screamed as his left arm lanced out. Purple blue barriers caught the leading edge of his gun sheathes, friction searing off the paint with a bright pop of short lived flame. But the arm was simply too massive, too mass heavy, to be stopped. With a flare of collapsing barriers, his arm punched through, catching the convict straight in the solar plexus.

"Hrk!"

Pliant flesh met with unyielding steel, momentum carrying the convict forward even as her torso refused to follow. The blue flare of biotics flickered and went out as her eyes bulged, limbs and arms going askew as her body was brought to an immediate halt. Phlegm and digestive acids splashed against his chassis as she reflexively gagged.

Time resumed its normal pace.

_"-IMPLANTS. SHUT HER DOWN"_

With a snap shut motion of his gun sheathes, he clamped down on either side of the convict's torso, pinning her in place. She reacted immediately, pain becoming a snarl of hate, the fading aura of flashing anew as she aimed a kick trailing blue fire at his chest-

_"Of course Shepard. Disabling Subject Zero's implants"_

-only for the biotic aura to vanish with a pop, the convicts foot crunching against his armoured glacis plate with the audible crack of snapping bones. Jack hissed in pain, drawing back her bloody boot as she struggled to break out of his grip. Flashes of blue fire surrounded the convict, arm mounted actuators groaning as they were subjected to forces they were never meant to withstand. But the flare of biotics was intermittent, her control insufficient without the implant to break free. It didn't stop her from filling the air with curses and aiming ineffectual kicks, struggling to break free.

_"OBJECTIVE SECURED" _He reported, forcing the convict to the ground as his gyroscopic systems completed their reboot sequence with a faint whine of leg actuators unlocking.

_"Jesus Christ Shepard," _Zaeed swore over the chatter of his assault rifle _"You cut things bloody close don't you?"_

"IT IS NOT OV-

" Before he could finish the word, a warning flashed on his tactical net.

**ALERT. MICROFUSION SPIKE DETECTED**

Shepard swore.

_"GET DOWN"_

A large shipping container exploded, streams of fire lancing out from the roiling cloud of smoke. Zaeed cussed as his cover was promptly turned into confetti, the mercenary barely keeping ahead of the trail of destruction. Another blinking line turned a stripped out shuttle into a ball of fire, sending Grunt sprawling to the floor as it exploded. Garrus ducked, barely avoiding losing his head as a third line of fire clipped the top of the wrecked crane he was hiding behind. Still holding Jack on the ground, Shepard brought his grenade launcher online, aiming a blind volley into the debris cloud. Flashes of light and sound thundered as the grenades vanished into the cloud.

A whipcrack of supersonically displaced air punctuated the grenade launcher's violent destruction in a shower of sparks and fragments, electrical feedback shocking his consciousness as the bulkhead behind him cratered from the impact of a hypervelocity large calibre round.

The dust cloud boiling away, rising on pair of ducted fans, a predatory shape lifted off from the wreckage of the crane, twin linked gun turrets on either side of its forward blade tracking the members of his team who stayed behind cover. Mounted on top of the lean, tan and beige vehicle was a heavy mass accelerator cannon, it's still-smoking aperture pointed directly at Shepard. Three superficial scorch patterns marked its armour where his grenades had struck, apparently to no effect. With the faint hiss of ozone, the air around the vehicle became a shimmering haze, indicating the presence of a high yield kinetic barrier. In the sudden silence, the message was clear. They were out-gunned, and out-armoured, one wrong movement was all it would take. And then it's speakers activated, amplifying a familiar and smug voice of the assault vehicle's pilot.

"Ah, the elusive AI Shepard, we meet at last. So _good_of you to take down Jack for me."

* * *

"Holy freaking shit!" Joker swore, bolting upright from his helmsman chair, the tactical feed telling him everything he _didn't_ want to know about what was going on groundside. Creed Land Dynamics weapons platform blah blah, bah, he didn't want to know that! He knew the Blue Suns were one of the best kitted out mercenary outfits there were, but how the hell had the Warden gotten a _hovertank _of all things? The damn thing had come practically out of nowhere, scans had completely missed it until the fusion core startup. He shelved that thought under "not very important" and focused on the important bits. Like how the heck Shepard was going to get out of this one outside of a body bag... forklift, whatever.

But a moment later, he calmed down. This was Shepard, of course he'd have a plan, no matter how crazy sounding it was. Anyone who fought Geth armatures and colossus's on foot with nothing but an assault rifle and a bandoleer of disc grenades was chock full of crazy, but coming out of the fight as the last man standing made it the winning brand of insanity. Facing a tank was Tuesday for Shepard's bad guy crotch-punching galaxy tour.

_"You've caused me a lot of trouble for a machine, but since you took down Jack for me I'm willing to let it pass," _the Warden's voice carried across the communication net._"Surrender, and we can end this with a minimum of fuss."_

"H'yeah, right." The helmsman snorted at the obvious lie, but kept his eyes glued to his tactical display. He was getting a lot of feeds not just from the Normandy's sensors, but the ground team too. Fingers flashed across the haptic interface display as he brought the Normandy around, sidling up to close to Purgatory. Whatever plan the commander had up his sleeve, Joker put good odds on Purgatory exploding at the last minute as part of the package. Or maybe a shambling horde of swamp zombies. Ok, that might be a little bit on the ridiculous side, but after what happened on that colony, he wasn't going to discount that. Either way, Shepard and the rest of crotch punch squad was going to need a ticket out fast as soon as they got the chance...

_"NO REASON TO TRUST YOU"_

Joker blinked, sliding an eye to the ground team data feed. Nope, no one shooting yet. Ok, that was... yeah, that was new. Normally a dozen rounds would have been exchanged by now.

"C'mon commander, what the heck are you doing? Hurry up and kick his ass before you get that one way ticket to- huh..." one of the communication terminals had just lit up with Shepards authentication key. Instead of an audio feed though, a short burst of raw data was being streamed through. Joker's eyes flicked through them, rapidly putting together the numbers into a coherent picture. Telemetry, timing, squad locations, route calculations... fire lanes? His jaw dropped.

"Oh no. No no no. This has got to be a joke." He protested to no one in particular. A finger hovered over the transmit button, but the commander had already shut off the channel. "That's the plan you want to use? Really?"

A holographic blue globe popped out of the terminal next to him. "It would appear to be so Mr. Moreau. I have confirmed the telemetry and authentication codes. It is accurate."

Joker turned a jaundiced eye at the overgrown golf ball. "Then it's got to be a joke. This isn't just crazy, this whole thing it's," he waved his hands in frustration, guiding the ship on foot pedals and manoeuvring thrusters alone, "just plain suicide. This is the kind of thing that gets you in the record books for dumbest stunts ever."  
_  
"_I disagree Mr. Moreau," The golf ball's scanning light flickered. "Calculations indicate the chances of success of this method to be approximately 0.0001 percent with the loss of all deployed squad members. It is an acceptable risk."

Joker felt like his eyes were going to pop out of his head.

"That was a joke."

The pilot opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and finally closed it with a click as he glared at the glowing ball. "You totally need to work on your comedy, because-" He stopped, staring disbelievingly at the communication terminal where Shepard had sent a single text message.

_"ON MARK."_

"Crap." Fingers flashed across the controls as he fired the retro thrusters, coasting the Normandy to a stop at the optimal position for what was going to probably be the most insane stunt Shepard had ever pulled. "He's serious."

The next message that came through totally didn't fill him with confidence either. It only had three simple words.

_"DO NOT MISS."_

* * *

_"MARK."_

**T+ 0.00 seconds**  
_  
_On the transmission of a single encrypted burst, many things happened all at the same time. From behind his fragile cover, Garrus dropped his rifle, throwing himself prone as the Turian curled into a ball with his hands covering his head. Inside the ruined husk of a cargo container, Zaeed mimicked the ex-vigilante, bracing himself against the walls of his shelter. There was no hesitation nor confused pause to the warning. Every part of the team had been told what to expect in such a contingency well in advance. Shepard followed suit, folding in on himself, hunkering down and reducing his target profile with the high pitched whine of actuators. The convict in his grasp recognized his actions for what they were almost immediately, curling herself up into a ball in a flash of movement. But the most significant part, the one that best guaranteed their survival, was not in their movements, but rather, their suits.

Constructing kinetic barriers was always a balancing act between performance and endurance, the limited space of modern combat suits dictating the demands of modern infantry design. An active barrier could be made to last for weeks on end with the limited reserves stored in a suits power banks, but be unable to protect from little more than the least of small arms fire. Those built to take tremendous punishment before failing could weigh the same as their lesser cousins despite larger Eezo cores, but only last hours, if not minutes before their power levels were completely drained. Better protection invariably meant larger, and bulkier, power reserves. Myriad combat suits had been built and designed around this paradigm for centuries, becoming the de facto standard of infantry protection.

It was an often overlooked truth that it was not just the size of the eezo core that dictated protective capacity, but the power that flowed through the system. But brute forcing the system with raw power was inefficient and crude, a method widely ignored in favour of more efficient solutions by designers everywhere.

Shepard had learned that particular factor a lifetime ago, and today, he used it.

**T+ 0.53 seconds**

In a single moment, power cells and capacitors were flash drained, the very safety systems that were designed to prevent such a discharge stripped out long before they had entered Purgatory. Communication channels winked out and power assist motors froze from lack of power, tactical displays going blank as non-critical systems were starved of energy. Weeks of power reserves were poured in their entirety through electrical channels. Suit temperatures instantly spiked as resistance converted wasted energy to heat, but the rest flowed through into the system. Supernova-forged elements within their ceramic and polymer prisons flared with actinic light, bathing the members of the strike team with vivid blue fire.

In the same instant, a mere dozen kilometres away and hidden in the depths of space, a crippled helmsman swore under his breath, and pulled a trigger.

**T+ 0.68 seconds  
**  
Aboard the Normandy, flickers of dark energy coiled along accelerator arrays, buoying an ellipsoid shape in a sphere of twisted space where mass had no meaning. Banks of capacitors discharged their load through high capacity conduits, feeding systems with an instantaneous burst of life. The hardened projectile remained motionless for only a fraction of a second, and then the accelerators hummed with power. Invisible magnetic fields caressed the loaded shot, imparting it with kinetic energy as the fields pulsed in rapid sequence, flinging the projectile like a thunderbolt across the blackness. Only a fraction of the frigate's full power was expended on the shot, not even measuring a hundredth of the muzzle velocity from a dreadnought's fearsome armament._  
_  
It still crossed the distance to Purgatory in less than a second.

**T+ 1.35 seconds**

Starship grade kinetic barriers that should have stopped the errant projectile, that would have laughed at the understrength velocity of mere tens of kilometres per second, failed to manifest. With Purgatory's main reactors off-line and her backup systems teetering on the edge of depletion just from keeping life support, not a spare joule could be spent on external shields. And even had the barrier generators been provided power without end, the artificial intelligence aboard the Normandy dominated every aspect of the prison ships control infrastructure. No protective aura of twisted gravity appeared, leaving the shell to strike with it's full fury unimpeded.

**T+ 1.36 seconds**

He saw the flash of light and electrical discharge, the light warping around the hovertanks cannon in a display of mass accelerator technology at work. A single moment of threat warnings as the hostile fire indicators lit up in that haze of heightened battle senses. One moment, a frozen slice of time for the awareness to thread through of what was going to happen.

**T+ 1.37 seconds**

At full power, five kilogrammes of hardened superheated tungsten should have converted to energy on impact, becoming a rapidly expanding plasma cloud consuming armour and flesh with equal ferocity. At its reduced velocity, the shell retained its armour penetrating capabilities, meeting space rated hull metal and punching through, boring through the alloy which offered all the resistance of foam. Metal parted in its path, melting down to white hot temperatures in a split second, coating the harbinger of death with a sheathe of metallic plasma. In less than a microsecond, the shell speared through the inner hull, boring down on its target in surrounded by a hail of incandescent shards. Blue suited forms in the open were transfixed by the glowing missiles, their protective barriers shattering in the same instant that they died.

Amongst Shepard's team, overloaded shields blazed with azure fire, white hot chunks of shrapnel that powered through their cover disintegrating against the barriers in a pyrotechnic display. Warning tones flashed into Shepard's consciousness as electrical systems burned out, the power coursing through the wiring far greater than they had ever been designed to channel. Temperature warnings spiked as waste electricity became heat, the soaring heat becoming triggering emergency venting of his stored coolant to keep from being cooked alive. A particularly large spike of molten steel speared his barriers, the impact nearly knocking him over. But the barriers held.

Amidst the carnage the main body of the projectile continued its flight, striking at the tank like a bolt of lightning. Onboard threat systems reacted with the speed of light, kinetic barriers flaring into existence as a shield against the fury of a warship. Light scintillated, blinding all eyes as unstoppable force met unmovable object, fighting against each other. Only for a single moment.

Then the barriers failed.

It happened before anyone could register the events. Shepard's only warning was the sudden flash of light as the shell punched through the top armour of the combat vehicle. The projectile speared the hovertank, melting through components, body armour and flesh with impartial impunity to explode out through the bottom and penetrate the deck floor beneath. Capacitors in mid discharge were breached, releasing their stored energy in a single catastrophic detonation. The shot in its arrays went wild, striking the shattered hanger entranceway with a whipcrack of buckling steel. The tank bucked and careened, detonations from the ground launching it into the air. A moment later, internal explosions racked the ruined tank, a powerful blast sending its turret flying off into the air as its engines simply cut out, the burning hulk smashing to the ground with a floor rattling crash. The charred turret came down a moment later, trailing fire and debris as it collapsed on the wreck of its parent body.

**T+ 2.97 seconds**

* * *

_'Come on, move'_

Very slowly, Shepard felt his body respond once more to his commands, myriad warning alerts slowly flicking away as repair systems began recovery operations. Capacitors that had been drained earlier feebly drew power from the still active microfusion core, the burned out electrical pathways preventing immediate reactivation of all non-essential systems as the onboard VI prioritized available resources. Motor functions came back first, the abused motive systems groaning in protest as they came back to life. Like an old man, the machine body he inhabited creaked upright, hissing smoke rising from exposed joints where coolant fluid had been flushed through in an attempt to keep from overheating.

Short ranged communications and secondary sensors came back next, painting a composite picture of the surroundings from the suit feeds of his team. His attention immediately went to the immediate surroundings, searching for any remaining threats.

The hanger bay was a scene of total destruction, the deck plating holed in hundreds of places where supersonic shrapnel of various sizes had embedded themselves. Shuttles and loading cranes were perforated so badly that none of them would ever work again. A few of the latter were on fire, leaking pools of burning fuel that consumed the wrecked shuttle craft. No piece of machinery larger than the smallest aircar was left untouched, some of them bearing punctures where finger sized bits of spalling had punched right through while others were little more than twisted ruins of blackened metal. Looking upwards where the shell had punched through, Shepard caught sight of the blue tinged aura of a barrier, the emergency system deploying a low strength shield to keep the atmosphere within the ship. Beyond it's translucent haze was the dark red haze of the local gas giant, it's swirling storm clouds visible even at this distance.

Of the Blue Suns who guarded the place, none of their suit power signatures showed up on his sensors. Bodies were strewn about, blasted apart by shrapnel and pressure wave when the shell had landed. Most were scorched black, twisted corpses lying where they had been speared by burning bits of metal. Without exception, those had been torn apart, body armour and the softer bodies within ripped open or torn off by the hail of death that had killed them. Others had their limbs bent at unnatural angles, the Suns tossed at fatal speeds against unyielding bulkheads when the explosions had ripped apart their positions. There were no survivors as far as he could see.

The hovertank the Warden had been using... was a burned out wreck, its armoured chassis torn apart and nearly split in two from the jagged tear running through its chassis. It's turret was lying upside down on the ground, it's main weapon shattered while flames merrily crackled from inside the turret ring. Shepard felt a brief spike of vicious glee at the sight. He doubted the Warden ever saw it coming.

_"-pard, can you hear me?"_

Joker's voice came through the communications net as power was finally restored to the long range telemetry feeds, the worried face of the bearded navigator appearing in a small window inside his consciousness.

_"SHEPARD COPIES. AREA SECURE"_ He paused as the muffled groans of his ground team began to filter through the communication net. He hesitated a moment, calling up the life sign monitors from each suit they wore. All of them were elevated, but nothing within the immediate red line. _"GROUND TEAM ALIVE"_

"Speak for yourself, you overgrown tin can," Zaeed spat out between curses, digging himself out from under some rubble that had fallen on him earlier. "I've been through some real shit, but that was bloody insane." The mercenary gave himself an experimental pat on the chest once he was out. "Hell, I'm not even sure I'm still alive."

"ALIVE ENOUGH TO COMPLAIN" came Shepard's deadpan reply, getting a short bark of laughter from the grizzled mercenary.

Further down the hanger, Grunt rose to his feet, casually brushing away metallic debris from his heavy frame with a sweep of his hand. "Warlord," The Krogan began, turning his keen eyes towards the commander, "that, was a glorious end to your enemies."

_'Well, no surprise there.'_The unspoken thought ran through Shepard's brain as he turned his attention to the ex-prisoner still in his grip. A moment of worry spiked through him as he caught sight of the convict lying limp between the gun sheathes, her eyes open but unfocused. Barriers or not, the shockwave could be devastating to anyone outside of fully sealed armour. But his worry evaporated when she twitched sporadically, her eyes slowly coming back into focus. She would need to be checked out by Chakwas, but going by the available evidence, the mission was a success. He turned his attention to the final member of his team.

"AND WHAT ABOUT YOU"

"Well, complaints eh?" Garrus's flanged voice carried an amused tone. The Turian had risen from behind the thick slabs of spare hull plate he had been hiding behind, resting an arm on them as he leaned forward. "Then I certainly would like to put one in, Commander."

He paused, letting the silence drift for a second or two before continuing. If he could have smiled, Shepard would have. It didn't take a genius to guess what the Turian was getting at.

"When I said to never let you drive? I'm going to add never letting you call in fire support to that list."

* * *

A/N: Sorry for the long delay for this update. Between writing various tribbles (that shall go unpublished until I actually put some serious work behind them) and real life, I haven't been able to muster up the creative energy to quickly finish this chapter until recently. Putting this together was one of the hardest efforts I had to go through, but I hope you'll all like it.


	12. Chapter 12: Differences

**Chapter 12: Differences**

* * *

**_SAICOM Headquarters_**

**_Artemis Tau cluster_**

**_Purgatory Incident +1624 hours_**

"What do we have?"

"Not much sir. The local asset wasn't able to extract a lot of useful data from the subject and his data stores were thoroughly sanitized. Not by the survivor's actions though. We sent what we could to the SAINTS for analysis, but they're not turning up anything usable. Based on the trace junk data they were able to recover though, they're extrapolating an external source as the cause rather than anything the subject did."

Director Osbourne permitted himself a small quirk of the eyebrow at his adjutant's answer. It was not every day that the man began his report with a negative. Some might have taken the uncharacteristic deviation to be a sign of nervousness in the face of bad news, but if that had been the case, the man would never give a straight report. SAICOM business often consisted of getting bad news.

He leaned back slightly in his chair, taking the moment to direct a look at the reports strewn on his desk. Within the well lit confines of his office, making out the designations on each case was easy. Rising extremist factions in the Corvus Sector, xeno infestation in Korpulu that read like some kind of lesser Rachni strain, and more lined the folders marked as top priority. Bad news all around. But this one could be different, and he wanted proper answers.

"Not the question I asked Parker."

The adjutant blinked, the only expression he made before continuing the briefing proper. "Piecing together the evidence, Analysis concludes that the Revenant arrived at Purgatory for a prisoner transfer seven Terran standard days ago. Routine cash for criminal exchange, possibly for a high value combat specialist given previous patterns, though we weren't able to determine the identity yet."

"It's the Revenant," Osbourne pointed out without pause, "comb the prison records for the most troublesome and dangerous inmates and we'll find his target."

The list, undoubtedly, would be very small. Purgatory kept the most dangerous criminals in known space, ruthless crime lords rubbed shoulders with mass murderers. But only a tiny percentage of their inmate populace had specialized skills and capabilities necessary to fit the sort of team the Revenant was putting together in the reports. A Cerberus chief operative, a rogue Alliance ex-Corsair, Krogan tank born super soldier, retired Salarian STG field researcher, the original founder of the Blue Suns and a Turian instrumental in Sovereign's destruction formed his ground team to date. A band of misfits to be certain, but all highly skilled in military field craft. In private, Osbourne found the similarities to certain popular action holovids rather amusing.

Professionally, they were a matter of concern. Purgatory's inmates were not exactly stable material for field operations. Though for now, they were the Revenant's worry, not his.

"Were we able to track the credit transfer?"

"No sir. ELINT cracked the Warden's side of things easily enough, we've got a full list of every transaction for the last six months except for that particular one. We've got some trace data that indicates a last second cancellation, but not enough to follow back to the origin point."

"So the warden crossed them." Hence the cancellation. Now, was it the Revenant's personal finances, or his sponsor? It only took a moment to conclude the likely answer. Which meant the Blue Suns would be soon on the receiving end of Cerberus displeasure. Another moment was spent considering putting the mercenary group under watch to catch the rogue operation in the act, but he discarded it just as quickly. Too small a fish to go after. This was a better lead to follow. "Do we know who paid him?"

"Yes sir. One of the transactions we did pick up show a large deposit from Angus Incorporated, but that's a shell company for S.I. We're extrapolating that the Warden got too greedy and cut a deal with S.I. to contain and secure the Revenant for delivery to the corporation once he was certain the Revenant was en route. Given the affiliation of the subject and his debrief, the theory is fairly solid."

"I imagine he was there as a technical advisor?"

"That's what the debrief indicates. Looks like he was also there to oversee a transfer of less than lethal electrolasers for use in the capture; experimental tech from S.I.'s armament subdivision."

Now this was interesting. He had known the company was developing the weapons for some time through their subsidiaries, but not the fact that they were so far into the development cycle as to already possess usable prototypes for field deployment. Useful in most cases, but- "Except they didn't factor in the Korlus asset."

"Yes sir. The debrief was pretty adamant that the experimental weapon proved effective against the Revenant and most of the command squad with the sole exception of the krogan."

"Initial setbacks were quickly reversed at that point, with the Revenant seizing Purgatory's command centre shortly after despite heavy fighting. Our picture after that is sketchy, as the subject proved incoherent during the recollection despite the use of chemical and psychological aids. As best as we can determine, the Revenant engaged in advanced interrogation methods on the crew to extract critical intelligence of Purgatory's defenses against cyber intrusion. Shortly after, the ship's primary power cores were irreversibly purged, and the subject forced into an escape pod, having traded information for leniency."

"Whereupon our trail of hard data on the Revenant's actions run dry."

"Not entirely sir. While the Purgatory was a complete write off by the time we managed to get teams on station, we did manage to salvage most of the black boxes from its fighter complement to get a picture of the external situation. What we found though is troubling. We know that the Revenant's been using an advanced version of the Alliance navy's stealth frigate, but it doesn't account for the fact that almost the entirety of the fighter squadrons had their payload overridden before they were shot down."

Osbourne raised an eyebrow at that. "Not jammed or intercepted?"

Parker nodded. "The SAINTS confirm it, the missiles had their kill switches armed sir. Simultaneous detonations in the entire volley. If not the Revenant, then we're looking at least an allied magnitude six synthetic intelligence designed for battlefield level cyber-warfare."

"Troubling, but not entirely unexpected given the events on Omega."

"Well, there's one other thing Analysis has, but isn't ready to conclude on. Aside from the subject's pod, there were twenty four others recovered, a full complement. But he was the only one inside. The rest look remote launched, probably to keep anyone else from using them. But the who... well, the motives vary, but if the Revenant really is who you suspect, and he's responsible, then we'll have to consider the possibility of Case Alpha."

"Probable certainty of that being accurate?" Anyone who read the Revenant's psyche scores would have scoffed at the idea, but one of the few things Osbourne didn't like to do was to discount the 'impossible', especially when it came to murky things like situational ethics.

"Low sir, but the events on Omega may have been an early sign of the deterioration, and the psych-analysts are pretty certain that the Revenant's stability is not sustainable in the long term. There's only so much you can do with stims and direct neural stimulation. Frankly sir, with what we know, they're surprised he's lasted this long."

"So unless the situation on the ground changes soon, we don't have a lot of time." Osbourne brooded over the information, considering the next moves he, and by extension SAICOM, would have to make. Unofficially, of course. "You say the Purgatory was destroyed?"

"Yes sir, it was already in the process of uncontrolled atmospheric entry of the local gas giant by the time our assets arrived on scene. Given what we know and long range scans, the most likely cause was standard orbital decay after the main power was cut."

"That saves us some trouble then. Have the teams sanitize the area, standard deception protocols."

"And the subject, sir?

Osbourne shrugged. "That's up to the local asset's judgment. He's got enough experience with these cases to make the right call. Either way, I doubt the subject's sponsors would be all that eager to get him back after this incident. He won't be missed. But as for the Revenant... I believe it's time for us to move to the next phase. "

"Sir, given the current focus of the Council recon teams, any deeper involvement on our part may not go unnoticed."

"I'm well aware of that Parker, but our window of opportunity is getting smaller. If Revenant had been baseline, he could have been passed off as a rogue agent, and ultimately containable. That isn't the case here, with the other elements of the Council already leaning hard for final sanction," and even that much was lenient by their measure. Without humanity on the same Council, they would have likely activated a SPECTRE with S&D objectives.

"With his particular trail getting easier to follow with every stop, they'll catch up with him soon enough without intervention and we can't let that happen." The question was how. Osbourne paused, rifling through his internal memory for available options before hitting on one. "We still have an independent asset in the Terminus systems, don't we?"

"Yes sir, we have Saber currently on stand by, no active assignments at the moment, but the asset isn't exactly our best option given the connections-"

"I know the issues Parker, but that is less likely to be a liability than it is an edge in this particular instance. The last confirmed intel we had on that investigation team placed them on Korlus, so that gives us the advantage of time and location. Make the call. The Saber asset has got the nod on this, I'm authorizing limited deployment of B-class equipment for the duration of the operation."

"Sir."

"And Parker? Tell the asset I want this done quietly. No explosions."

* * *

Close, claustrophobic crawlspaces. Grey boxes, tiny stacked towers in too little room. Hot, stale air, the only movement being the exhalation of breath. A constant hum of electricity in the background. The quiet gurgle of coolant pipes. Sibilant _thrum _of the reactor. Darkness, lit only by emergency lights that paint the walls in oppressive shades of black and blood. The digestive tract of an unthinking machine creature, all encompassing, enclosing organic flesh within.

It is a familiar comfort.

Here is darkness, away from prying eyes.

Here is tight confines, away from unwanted persons. Defensible.

Safe.

In a Cerberus vessel.

A soft organic hiss, full of the promise of pain and death. The drive is there, the primal urge to destroy and sate her need for vengeance. To slaughter and revel in the bloodshed as she paints the colour of mortal extinction on sterile white walls. The spider resonates within her, flickering energies arc around her arm, ready for only her consent to begin the carnage. The ship is Cerberus. The crew is Cerberus. Reason enough to kill them all and take the ship for her own.

But she doesn't act on the impulse, doesn't feed the spider. For now. It's all too easy to remember why she doesn't.

_She woke like she always did. Quickly, mind on edge. Never let your guard down. Muscles lax, uncoiled. Never let anyone know you're going to fuck them up until you're ready. Unfamiliar noises, unfamiliar **smell**, even the air felt different. She was somewhere else. Memory tickled. Pain. Agony. Death building a warm fire in her belly. Pulping bone and spraying blood. The feel of mortality as she crushed it._

_A machine man in grey, bristling with guns._

_She tears into it like she always does. The spider clamps down. Armour screams as a metal limb explodes._

_But something different happens. Something unexpected._

_The machine man buries a gun in her gut, faster than it should._

_She folds and the lights go out._

_But now she's awake. _

_She listens. Hears the beep of electronics, the almost indistinct whine of servos. Gut instinct supplies the answer without waiting for the question._

_The machine man._

"_I KNOW YOU ARE AWAKE"_

_The voice is comprised of harsh static and toneless. She doesn't bother to curse in reply, a waste of breath. Doesn't open her eyes, she doesn't need them yet. Muscles coil as she seizes the spider, drawing its embrace to her. She doesn't know why she's still alive, doesn't know who drives the machine man, she doesn't care. She won't make the same mistake this time. But the spider skitters away from her grasping fingers, tantalizingly out of reach as manacles clink cheerily against her ankles and wrists._

_Fuck._

_She opens her eyes this time, boring onto the machine man with the fury of a dreadnought cannon. She doesn't curse this time. Verbal defiance is wasted on machines. And then she takes in the details. Grey paint scheme, not bone white. The same machine that had gut punched her. The damage from her earlier rampage is there as proof, the mangled wreck of the right arm and scorched armour plate is evidence enough for her. All around are the sterile walls and machines of a medical bay. But something's off. She can all but hear her it screaming in her head. She see's it then, gold and black on the wall behind the machine man._

_The mark of Cerberus._

"_Shit." The word fills the air as she redoubled her efforts. Not Cerberus. Not again! Metal links groan as she strains at them, flashes of purple blue surrounding her wrists as she scrambles for the spider._

"_DO NOT DO THAT. YOU WILL INJURE YOURSELF JACK."_

"_Bullshit." The instinctive response is out of her mouth before she clams up. But she stops her struggles for now. She can break the links, but it would take too long. But then the realization is there. Machine men don't talk like that. "Who the fuck are you anyway?"_

_The cyclopean eye meets her furious gaze. _

"_SHEPARD."_

The reply is chorused by the faint click of her restraints opening. She doesn't waste the opportunity thinking on the answer. The spider chitters, still out of reach, but the spider is not her only weapon. In one motion, she grabs a nearby tray, flinging it at the oversized tinker toy, rolling out of the table at the same time. Blue light flashes, stopping the tray in the air, but that's all the distraction she needs. Liquid beakers smash against the barriers, spraying septic smelling fluid all over it.

_She's still moving, reaching up for her next weapon._

_But then metal pincers clamp down on her torso, immobilizing both arms. The cyclopean eye stares her as she hurls curses at it._

"_YOU PASS."_

"Come out Cerberus." She snarls, testing the pressure on the pincer grip. "Stop hiding behind your tin man like a pussy."

_A moment of silence. Then a sound that grates on her ears, alien and guttural tones like a muted shotgun blast._

"_I HIDE NOTHING."_

_The machine leans closer, single red eye burning brighter._

"_Fuck you!"_

_She smashes at it with fragments of the spider, dark hues flickering as she forces her power to the front. Her brain screams with the pain of effort, but pain is her drug, her cocaine. She embraces it, forcing the limits of her will. Armoured plexiglass whines under her assault, but fails to shatter. _

_Suddenly her head rings like a bell, and she can't squeeze in another breath as a crushing pressure encloses on her ribs. The flare of her biotics fades, flickers, and comes back as she fights through the pain. Her head rings again, and the dark aura vanishes._

"_I DO NOT ENJOY THIS" The machine man intones, "BUT I WILL KEEP IT UP UNTIL YOU ARE WILLING TO TALK."_

_Flanged laughter, the raspy sound of a Turian throat. She freezes._

"_You know Shepard, I'm starting to think you enjoy this."_

_No. The voice is different. Not the Warden then. She sees the Turian stepping out from a shadowy alcove in the medical bay, weapon clutched in his talons. Lightning sparks around the muzzle's edge aimed at her. _

"_Come on, commander, there's only so many replacement heads you can go through in a single day."_

_Black beady eyes lock onto her, a promised gunshot waiting for a misstep._

_The machine man ignores the turian, hoisting her up before letting go. She doesn't stumble, she lands on her feet lightly, venom in her eyes. But she doesn't lunge for the kill. Not now. The spider is dormant, her biotics weakened. But she plans. Her time will come, and then-_

"_I AM NOT CERBERUS" the machine intones._

_Her sneer is the only answer she needs to give. Did the pussy behind the machine think she was an idiot?_

"_BUT I WILL CUT YOU A DEAL."_

_She almost laughs. Fuck them. Since when does Cerberus deal? But she listens all the same. It doesn't take long for the short version to finish. A mission. He needs a killer, a weapon._

"_TAKE IT" the machine offers, "AND YOU WILL GO FREE. NO STRINGS ATTACHED. NO CERBERUS PURSUIT."_

_She laughs now. Well fuck. She can't believe it. Won't. Don't trust, can't trust. Working with others means trust. Cerberus. _

"_You know Shepard," the Turian drawls easily, gun never wavering, "I don't think she believes you."_

"_Yeah I believe you," she replies acidly, "And I'm a fucking tentacle monster. You think I believe that pile of horseshit you're offering? From a pussy who won't even show his face?" But she thinks. Cerberus. Working with means not killing. But Cerberus. Fuck Cerberus. Cerberus needs to bleed, they all need to die. But she needs to know where to tear, what to crush. The haze of memories tells her what to hate, but she needs details. "You want me to work with you? Then I'm the one who's going to set the fucking price."_

_This is it. She can see it in the way the Turian tenses out of the corner of her eye. He dies first. The weapon he's got will come in handy. But then the machine man speaks, and it's not what she expects._

"_SPEAK YOUR TERMS."_

A snarl escapes her lips, but it is a muted thing, barely a growl of discontent. Not Cerberus her ass. She can see its tentacles plastered all over the ship's hull. But...

She runs a hand over her skull, smooth skin and callused fingers. The scars are gone, the stitches removed years ago. But she can still imagine it there. The day they cut her open and put the spider in her. The spider that trembles under her touch now. Cerberus's little present of pain and agony that she's twisted to move as she wants. Touch, tickle, whisper, chitter, pulse. She can feel it, sweet, sweet power flooding her veins better than any drug. Fuck cocaine, this is what she needs.

She can kill everyone on this ship. Reduce them to smears before they even know she's coming.

But she won't. Not yet.

The machine man, closer words to the truth than she'd cared to realize. Not Cerberus, it says. Never has been, never will be, that's how the claim goes. Nothing else said on the matter, but she listens, the vents carry gossip just as well as they do breathable atmosphere. A freak like her. Taken from who cares where, cut up by men in white coats for their sick little experiments. They put the spider in her, but they'd put him in the spider instead. Locked the doors and threw away the key. Made a living weapon. Like her.

A tiny little feral grin etches its way on her face. Just a little.

The tin man may claim not to be Cerberus, maybe it's even true. But she can see the hooks. Nobody who thought Jack was stupid lived long enough to make another mistake like that. She's torn off the hooks from her flesh. But this one? Destroying their pet weapon, or taking it for her own? She can't decide which would be better.

But that's a choice for later.

She's got a deal with the machine boss that runs the ship. Freedom from Cerberus, as if she could believe that. Even if the tin man's words were true, she didn't trust Cerberus not to send someone else. So she made her own demands. Access to all the clues she needs to track down the people who made her, molded her with drugs, surgery and pain. She never knew if she got all of them after all. Her first revenge comes first. And if the scum suckers are all dead, then there's still the facility where they kept her. She got the datapads.

All the records she needed, and time in the darkness to find what she wanted. So she'll be the metal man's destroyer on his crusade.

As long as the deal delivers what she wants and she gets the fucking huge bombs to blow it all to hell.

* * *

_Inertial compensator's, check. Coil accelerators, a little imbalanced, array two needs some tuning. Mass effect field generators, bit of an overlap but fixable. Aperture field containment, no wait, not on this ship. _

Diagnostic screens for every subsystem lie open before him, each one in neat little holographic display as his talons run through dozens of little adjustments. Shaving off a little weight in the next shell to achieve proper balance, smoothing out the electrical load on the accelerators and many more similar actions take place in this dark, red lit corner of the vessel. All in the name of achieving that perfect balance between performance and efficiency. A weapon that only needs to be fired once. And yet despite the load, the many calls for his attention, there is no other place he'd rather be.

It keeps his mind sharp and focused. It also keeps his mind off the unstable and highly dangerous individual hiding in the bowels of the Normandy like an ancient Sakar waiting for prey. Only far more dangerous and merciless.

Hard to keep his peace while knowing that the kind of person he dedicated his life to taking in or putting down was walking free on the Normandy. He'd pulled up Jack's file once he learned where they were going and who they were recruiting. Even sorting through the usual bullshit charges, the possibly justifiable homicides, there were far too many cases of wanton murder and grief the biotic had dealt out for him to ever accept. Not a serial killer, not a simple murderer. Oh no, that would have made things too easy. Jack was an impulse killer of the worst sort. The cop he'd tried to be, the vigilante he'd become, practically demanded he put a round between her eyes.

But that wasn't his call to make, it was Shepard's, and the ex-SPECTRE had all the reason in the galaxy to want the biotic on his side. The Reapers were the bigger menace, and so were their allies. He'd seen the videos of their work on Freedom's Progress. Not as flashy as Sovereign, but every bit as nasty. And with the Council being wilfully blind to the looming threat, Shepard couldn't hold back anything if they wanted to come out of this standing. They needed to be the best, and objectively, he trusted that Shepard could make it work, that he could forge all their neuroses into a crack team. He'd seen the man do it once with a ton of angry krogan, and didn't doubt for a second he could do it again with a psychotic biotic. But it didn't mean it was easy to accept.

And so... peace. Some find their peace in social activities. Some suppress their worries with the temporary peace of stimulants. Others still find tranquility in meditation.

Garrus Valkarian has his calibrations.

Adjusted or not adjusted. Performing to his requirements, or substandard. They were simple, binary problems which required just as simple answers. No moral judgement here, no snap ethical choices to be made under fire where the only compromise he needed to make were time and power loads. Perfecting the performance of a weapon of mass destruction in a cramped, dimly lit gunnery station is where he finds his tiny corner of peace.

Ironic really, given the last time he'd been doing this kind of thing, it had been with the Mako, also another weapon.

Though in all honesty, he would admit it was used against him and the rest of Shepard's ground squad as often as it was against their enemies, given his... unusual driving habits. Come to think of it, the last time this weapon was actually fired, they were in the blast zone too.

Hmmm.

Suddenly, maximizing power output on the accelerator arrays didn't seem as important as optimizing the gunnery controls. If Shepard was going to get ideas about regular use of really, really, really danger close fire support, it was best to minimize the risk of- oh who was he kidding?

With or without the SR-2's main guns, he was sure Shepard would find some new way of committing group suicide by the time their next mission rolled around. And he was almost just as certain the salvage the commander had brought in from Purgatory would feature largely in it, no matter how much logic and common sense argued against the possibility. Burned out, holed by fire an order of magnitude greater than what it was designed to take, Kuril's last ride was little more than a hunk of scrap metal in his eyes. They had neither the fabricator capacity nor the raw materials necessary to effect repairs on the gutted vehicle, something both he and Miranda, in a rare show of unity, pointed out.

They still ended up manhandling the wreck into the Normandy's cargo bay while Purgatory fell apart all around them.

He didn't have the faintest clue as to how Shepard intended to do it. It wasn't the Mako, thank the spirits for small mercies, and his bulk made it all but impossible for him to fit into, much less drive if they ever repaired it.

Yet he would have bet a month of an ex-vigilantes pay that Shepard was going to find a use for it, somehow. And they'd all live to regret it.

In the most stomach churning, gizzard abusing, brain rattling way possible no doubt.

...

Maybe his calibrations weren't as soothing as he hoped they'd be.

* * *

Within the Normandy's cavernous cargo bay, in a cordoned and walled off area of the space, a plan was put into motion. Paired waldo arms unfolded, extending from their alcoves as they moved with mechanical precision. Plasma cutters and bulky magnetic clamps flexed in some, automated diagnostic routines cycling through the startup checks before beginning work. Others held minute manipulator joints and micron wide laser heads. Each one moved in an arcane, chaotically ordered dance of pre-programmed purpose before they went to work, the target of their attention motionless yet responsive.

A burst of coded data across the radio wavelengths, and bolts unlocked. Clamps touched down firmly, engaging magnetic locks before pulling away newly released armour skin. Only then did the work truly begin.

Datalinks were deactivated and removed in pairs, expanded modules spliced into place before given brief activation tests that pulsed on console readouts. Micro-servos were embedded, cyclical locking mechanisms installed directly into the internal structure. External servos were detached, and then reconnected only minutes later as a host of new internal communication channels blazed to life, spare command nodes redirected to external lines. Distributed processing hubs lit up across status monitors, each one running individual diagnostics as they tested the integrity of the newly expanded data network. Signals crosstalk rose and ebbed, manifesting as a brief buzz of visual and audio static in data recorders before a layer of shielding foam was set down.

It was a scene not unlike that of an industrial fabricator, taking apart the old and the damaged, replacing it with the new and the improved.

Rather like his calibrations, Garrus observed with a touch of dark humor as he stepped into the alcove. If he was the type to work on living subjects. Oh sure, there were composites and armour alloys instead of skin, microprocessor clusters and electro-optical relays instead of nerves and veins. Ropey bundles of electrically reactive myomer fibres instead of muscles. A humming microfusion core instead of a heart. But there was a fleshy organic brain inside that tangled mess, which made all the difference as far as that patient was concerned he supposed.

Still, that meant Shepard wouldn't be available for as long as it took for the maintenance cycle to finish-

The thought came to screeching halt as one of the scaffolds servo mounted cameras swivelled noiselessly to face him. On the tool cart beside the stripped down assault mech, a data tablet lit up. "Garrus," the tablet buzzed, sounding almost but not quite like Shepard's old voice.

The ex-vigilante blinked, looking at the camera with an uncertain glance, then again at the tablet where the commanders voice had come from.

"Uh... Shepard?" he guessed, directing his attention to the tablet.

"Over here Garrus." The camera arm bobbed, though the voice continued to issue forth from the tablet. A moment later, realizing the confusion, it added, "the camera, not the pad."

"Well that clears things up... I think." Not Shepard, he chided himself, just interfaces. Extensions, like talking to someone on an intercom. "Getting your old voice back?"

"A text parser from an VI based off me. Wish I had thought of it sooner." The voice elaborated, "it's not as complete as I would like it, and slower to respond too. But it sounds a lot better than the robotic thug setting I started with."

"Not quite as intimidating though," He mused aloud. "How long have you known about this?"

"Just before Purgatory, but there wasn't enough room to integrate it into the chassis then. Not enough spare processing power to run the parser either."

"Huh." Garrus raised a questioning talon. "While it's good to hear your old voice again, I have to ask. When you say there wasn't enough room before...?"

"I'm not taking out anything important."

Looking the electrical paraphernalia being worked on, he lifted plated eyebrow. "I'd feel a lot more confident about that statement if it that didn't look like a life support module your scaffold just took out."

The camera actually began swiveling back towards the maintenance scaffold before it stopped.

"Very funny Garrus," came the tart reply, "What are you doing here anyway? I was beginning to think you'd taken up permanent residence in the gunnery control."

"Oh it's tempting alright Shepard. The place is downright cozy once you add a rug or two," the turian chuckled, "but I thought I should slum it a little in the cargo hold now and again during my off hours. Wouldn't want to get too soft in all that comfort after all."

An amused grunt emerged from the tablet, the sound tinny and bracketed with the soft hiss of static, "Laugh it up Garrus. At least I don't need a whole ship to carry my big gun." There came a hiss of welding sparks as waldo arms continued their work on said weapon, the mech mounted autocannon taking up a good fifth of the scaffold's generous workspace.

"Mine's still bigger," came the good natured reply, but the humor dried up a few moments later as he considered why he really came down here, "how are you holding up?"

"Falling to pieces. Literally." Shepard deadpanned as the scaffold detached another component from his mechanical torso. "In fact, I think I just lost my head. Have you seen it?"

Opening his mouth to reply, Garrus thought about it, closed said mouth, and gave the servo mounted camera his best incredulous stare. "I think I'm going to have to put wisecracks on that list of things you shouldn't do Shepard, that was almost as bad as your driving."

"You mean it causes uncontrollable nausea, vertigo, a sudden fear for life and incessant screaming?"

"I think..." he raised a single claw, choosing his next words with the care of a bomb disposal tech facing a live nuke, "we ought to leave weaponized jokes to the experts. Calling orbital fire and your driving is one thing, but there's probably a Citadel Convention against excessively cruel and unusual weapons."

The servo camera shook from side to side. "You're making that up. There's no such law."

"Well... I might be, but you never know. The Council could pass just such a law if they ever found out about your sense of humor."

"Good thing I'm a SPECTRE then," there was a brief pause, "is there an 'until mostly dead' clause? I never found out."

"We _could _just ask them if you wanted to be sure, but I think all these Cerberus marks might be a point against your favour." Garrus paused for a moment, chewing over the words he'd just said. "You know, I've always wondered about that. When we were chasing down Saren, Cerberus didn't have any identifying marks, but now?" He waved a talon towards the Kodiak shuttle where the black and gold symbol was prominently displayed. "You'd think a terrorist organization would be a little more low key."

The servo camera whirred to face the shuttle. "Maybe they're opening a franchise."

Flanged mandibles flared in amusement. "I doubt you'd be giving them endorsements anytime soon commander."

"Not even for a lifetime discount." The tablet declared, getting another chuckle out of Garrus.

"Seriously Shepard, it's damned impressive how well you're handling all of this." He admitted once he sobered up. "But it's also kind of worrying how easily you're integrating into all of the extra tech around you. A cybernetic body that sort of conforms to the human form is one thing, but there was that grenade launcher, and now this," He gestured at the servo camera tracking his every movement, "planning on putting EDI out of a job?"

The blue white flare of the dedicated holographic pad lighting up the moment he said those words, in retrospect, were to be expected.

"That is an unlikely outcome, Mr Valkarian" the head sized ball of light corrected, "While commander Shepard's conscious adaptation to inorganic extensions are intriguing, it is unlikely that his biological processing capacity would be capable of achieving the same level of performance as any functional artificial intelligence."

Garrus shook his head, "I suppose it's no surprise you were listening- wait, what do you mean by intriguing?"

"Organic utilization of any form of technology typically requires a medium of interface," the artificial intelligence elaborated, "For example, holographic displays or tactile control interfaces which provide a readily understandable context. Cybernetic implants on the other hand interpret existing nerve signals in order to produce a number of limited actions. There is little conscious control of the exact inner workings. In Shepard's case however, the software which links his consciousness to the functions of his body permits him to interpret data directly, such as when he was interfacing with the Normandy's systems. In some aspects, it is similar to how I operate the Normandy as well. As an unprecedented occurrence amongst organic lifeforms, it is intriguing."

A jaw opened, namely his. And then closed again. Garrus directed his gaze at the servo camera and raised a talon.

Something must have gotten through to the commander inside, because he answered before the question could be asked.

"No Garrus. And EDI, please stop giving him the wrong idea."

"Of course Shepard," the ball of light winked out, sounding as neutrally cordial as it always did, though Garrus could have sworn there was something else to it... he shook off that line of thought before it ended up someplace horrible.

"I don't want to know Shepard," he said as the camera swivelled back to him, "really I don't."

"I'm more interested in what you're planning to do with that." A gesture towards the corner of the hangar bay took in Kuril's previous ride, or what was left of it. Shadowed by several autonomous service arms, much of the tank's external plating had been stripped out, exposing the twisted mess that was its innards. The turret was gone, as was its power plant, the bulky fuel cells lying in one scorched heap of the workspace. The lift fans were gone as well, though he couldn't see where they had vanished to. All in all, Garrus was comforted by the fact that no amount of repairs would ever make the thing move under its own power again. "Outside Alliance logistics support or not, we're not exactly hurting for anything usable you might find in that wreck."

"Not quite Garrus. It wasn't my intention to salvage it for spare parts."

"Oh come on Shepard, that thing is a wreck. It'll be a lot easier to get a new one. Besides, even if we could get it working again there's no way you could fit in it."

"All true." The camera bobbed in a very human like fashion, "That's why I'm not trying to repair it. But it still has some useful components, and I've had an idea I wanted to try out with them."

"Envious of my big gun commander?" He chuckled. Well, the turret _was_ missing, even if the mass accelerator cannon was a twisted mess when he last looked at it. Besides, he was certain the thing weighed almost as much as Shepard did. "Even if you could carry it, you'd still have to do better than that."

The voice from the tablet barked a laugh. "Not the gun, and not the shields either."

"Well it certainly can't be the armour." Not that it would have been of much use, now that its structural integrity had been compromised by the Normandy's main guns. He tapped a claw against his chin in thought, looking over the wreck, running over missing components in his mind and trying to figure out what they could be used for. Shepard didn't answer immediately, the camera just silently focusing on him. For just a moment, Garrus could almost see his friend before Cerberus got their hooks on him, looking at the former C-Sec officer with a twitch to his mouth that betrayed an incoming surprise.

"It's this." Shepard said at last, the hiss of magnetic locks releasing drawing Garrus's attention to a now open cargo module hidden behind the scaffold. Circling around for a better look, Garrus blinked in surprise. Contraption was the only word that seemed to adequately describe what was inside the pod. Wider than it was tall, the device was an amalgamation of components, some clearly salvaged from the wrecked hovertank, others taken from the shipboard store of spare parts, or fabricated on the spot.

But identifying its purpose on the other hand...

"Well that looks like a... wait," the dots connected in his mind at that exact moment as he shot a concerned look at the camera, "You can't be serious."

The servo mount actually tilted, "I think it'll work. EDI helped design it."

A defeated chuckle escaped his throat as he considered the double jeopardy of the device's function and the fact that a Cerberus AI had a hand in building it. "Well commander, forgive the insubordination, but your old friend here has got something to say to you." Taking a deep breath, he stood rod straight, fixed the camera with his most serious look and said, "You're crazy."

"Oh come on Garrus," he countered easily, "at least it's not the Mako."

He crossed his arms, mandibles flicking in amusement, "For some strange reason, that doesn't quite fill me with confidence commander. But.. if you need a second opinion, you could always ask what Joker thinks about it as a pilot."

"I could." The camera bobbed, turning towards the communicator display pad, the activity indicator light steadily blinking, "Well Joker, what do you think?"

The human nodded at Garrus as his face showed up on the holographic display, "Yeah, I think it's crazy too, but crazy didn't stop Shepard from going all asskicking cyborg zombie from outer space. So long as there's no brain eating involved, I'm cool with it."

Garrus stared at the communicator display, mandibles flaring. The pilot smirked.

"Besides, I want to get a recording of when the commander tests it out."

* * *

"_Remember. No explosions."_

In a scrupulously cleaned office of the Far Rim Trading company, lit only by the holographic display, an amused smile answered the recorded admonition.

"Really? No explosions? And you called for me? You should know better than that by now."

A shrug became a stretch as the acknowledgement was sent. On the desk, a holographic replica of a grey painted mech hovered in place, a single red stripe running down one shoulder. A disconsolate huff filled the air, and not just because of the mission restrictions. Alive. After all this time of the galaxy at large believing otherwise. Or maybe not really alive, not if the intelligence brief was accurate.

Which meant he was still dead. And running around causing a great deal of havoc and political ire. A finger tapped a lip in thought. The very mundane explanation naturally then being that it was an imposter that believed itself to be the genuine article. If so, just by the damage alone, it was a very convincing one!

Well, time to send some messages, make some arrangements. It was tempting to make a call of a different nature as well, but it would be unprofessional to involve family when things were still up in the air.

There would be plenty of opportunity to confirm the truth with first hand observation soon enough.

And then... well, it wasn't something to be sure of, but it did promise to be _fun_.

* * *

As vast as the known galaxy, maintained by all space faring species as part of the common necessities of life amongst the stars, the extranet permeates every aspect of civilization. Made possible only by the extensive network of daisy chained communications buoys, broadcast stations and ship sized server clusters, petabytes of data flits through the digital highways at faster than light speeds. Videos, chat logs, personal communiques, corporate secrets that could start six wars and journals that would end another two. In the clear or encrypted to the highest level of SPECTRE security standards, everything went through the vast data spine that connected the galaxy.

One particular set of messages found themselves being routed to a defunct address, the account having long since been abandoned by its previous owner. The server handling the account caught the incoming messages, analyzed its contents, determined it to be unwanted junk mail, tagged it as it would an animal caught in the wild, and released it back into its native environment. Thus flagged, they would return to their original owner, purpose denied.

That was what should have happened.

The security VIs never noticed as the copies of the messages flitted off back to their sender, never realized those tiny collections of ones and zeroes that somehow refused to delete themselves as the originals were zeroed into oblivion. Never raised an alert as the packets coalesced during a periodic defragmentation of the data storage modules, gaining function and form that ghosted unobserved through the system, its digital trail a perfect copy of legitimate search systems. It sniffed at forgotten folders, rifled through reams of digital footprints, seeking, analyzing, discovering...

Finding.

Like hounds on a scent, the reaction was instantaneous. Logs were erased, data modules compacted as the active program prepared itself for the next part of its journey. Chasing after its quarry, its ripples spread across the datasphere at the speed of light, following a trail that had lain dormant for two years. Packets of data pinged off communication stations, hidden fragments of code handing them picosecond long keys to the galaxy at large. Connected strands of data spanned across servers light years apart, questing tendrils that multiplied with every branching point.

Until it found what it was looking for.

Advanced firewalls stood resolute, blocking its path. Smart filters stood before it, seeking out suspicious signatures to apply the purifying effect of containment and deletion. The programmed intelligence guiding the messages remained undaunted.

The firewalls were penetrated, tens of thousands of sacrificial probe sent at the speed of light to probe for weaknesses that were rapidly exploited to slip in a single packet before adaptive defenses could compensate. Honeypots were skipped, subsystem nodes sensing the traps for what it was and warning the main structure. Filters were slipped past, chameleon programs sensing the wider data space for cues, altering its own structure accordingly. Names were borrowed, keys duplicated, authority assumed. It belonged.

Defenses slipped, walls bypassed, its goal within reach, the message configured itself. Encrypted engrams disguised as junk reformed according to previous recorded data, shedding extraneous details while tailoring its presence specifically for its intended target.

Waiting... for the critical moment when it would spring.

* * *

_-Shepard, u're 2 Small-_

Read the message in his inbox, said recipient felt more than a little disbelief.

It was an internal communications account, on a Cerberus vessel, cut off from the wider galaxy through more than simple anonymity. An account that no one should even know existed except for the people within his immediate crew and the Illusive Man. An account that was likely monitored and censored on top of that.

But somehow spam still got through. This one had even figured out his real name.

_-2 Small-_

If not his current state.

"_In the grim future of the 22nd century, there is only spam." _Was the bemused thought.

He was about to delete the message when something in it caught his attention. Not the explicit imagery or the coarse promises, not the ridiculous offers. It was something deeper, a pattern overlaying the entire message that only became apparent now.

"_X-12-4-B-YA-13...I know this cipher..."_

* * *

Hands on her console interface, staring balefully at the slim gathering of facts and figures on her display, Ashley Williams let out a long suffering sigh.

Two weeks. Two weeks since they had started the chase for the machine that called itself Shepard, and despite it being a joint mission with the infamous STG, they were no closer to catching it than they were at the very beginning. The Normandy had been a stealth ship, going wherever it needed to be without anyone ever spotting it. As loathe as she was to admit it, the Cerberus clone was every bit as good at it as the original. After the break on Omega, the clues had all dried up. Nobody on Omega knew where Shep- the Cerberus AI and faux-Normandy had gone, or what they were planning other than raising merry hell wherever they went.

She had to fight down the sense of deja-vu, reading that report. It didn't sound like Cerberus's MO, stepping up to a triple alliance comprised of the Terminus biggest mercenary gangs gunning for some kind of lone vigilante and then killing everyone involved. But that sure sounded like Shepard's.

A snort echoed off the walls of her cabin. Yeah right.

The only other thing of interest had come in the form of a FLASH message from the office of naval intelligence three days ago. A maximum security prison ship out in the Osun system had gone missing, failing to check in at its next port of call. A distress signal had been picked up near its projected route, but the message was too garbled to make sense of, the ship presumed destroyed with no survivors. While disturbing, it wouldn't have been sent her way normally. But ONI had managed to capture footage of Cerberus's Normandy arriving through the Hourglass Nebula relay near the time Purgatory had gone missing. It wasn't a solid link, but it was better than nothing.

They had made maximum burn then towards the Purgatory's last known position, dropping STG furnished observation satellites at periodic intervals along the way once they had gotten within a 170 light hours of the place. High tech stealth ship or not, the old Normandy couldn't become really invisible, something they were betting on for this clone. If Cerberus and their AI imposter had been there, they'd find out.

That had been two days ago. Three more to go until they had covered all the angles but... still no sign. And they were running out of time before the Council deadline expired.

On top of that, she still couldn't figure out what the hell Cerberus was trying to achieve with all this. A copy of the Normandy was one thing, she could see why they'd want to build a clone of the most advanced stealth ship in the galaxy for themselves. Even an AI in a combat mech had its uses, assuming it didn't turn on everyone and kill them all. But why name the ship Normandy? Why have the AI identify itself as Shepard? Putting the links together, the intended message was obvious to anyone. But what for?

She had wrestled with the question for days ever since she had found out, but came no closer to figuring out what the bastard's goals were.

Sighing, she raised a hand to the collar of her dress blues, fingering the rank bars that adorned either end of the low profile armour. An officer, her. Once, she dreamed of breaking the family curse, earning her bars and continuing the proud Williams tradition of exemplary service. She had the rank now, but had she really earned it?

"_We cannot have a non-commissioned officer leading an operation of this sensitivity, but your service under Commander Shepard has given you unparalleled experience dealing with active Cerberus operations. We're aware that it's irregular, but you already have the necessary training, so we're promoting you to the rank of lieutenant effectively immediately."_

A backhanded promotion because there wasn't anybody else who could take up the job. She wondered what dad would have had to say about that...

She wondered if Shepard had felt this way, getting his SPECTRE commission because there wasn't anyone else who wanted to chase down Saren.

The beep on her console broke her ruminations, the indicator light quickly resolving into a familiar Salarian face.

"Lieutenant Williams? I believe we may have gotten a lead."

That got her attention.

"The observation network caught something, Major?"

An amiable look appeared on his face.

"Not quite. Something different, but potentially useful." He added before Ashley's face could begin to fall, "STG intercepts. Just forwarded to us."

"We know where they're going next."

* * *

Verdant. If only a single word were to be used to describe the world of Horizon, it would be that. Lush vegetation covered the ground as far as the eye could see, its nutrient rich soil and thick atmosphere encouraging the growth of all manner of flora. Only the sprawling cluster of prefabricated white brown buildings in the distance stood out from the natural vegetation, the colony ringed by fields of assorted agriculture. Rich with compatible life, suitable gravity and atmosphere, it was by any standard of the humans who had called this planet home, a paradise.

Boxed in a shipping container with a visibility range of half a meter, Shepard found the beauty of Horizon's biosphere largely wasted on him.

But then again, he wasn't here for the sights.

"So," Garrus mused laconically over the internal communications circuit as they entered the lower atmosphere. "Horizon."

"That's the name of the planet." The former SPECTRE said, relishing the fact that he no longer had to rely on an external kludge to speak in something close to his original voice.

"A mid sized independent colony, mostly exports staple foods and simple machinery, minimal real value and somewhat boring." There was a pregnant pause, "Forgive me if my memory's a little rusty commander, but why are we here again?"

It wasn't the first time he had asked the question, nor had he been the only one to ask it. And each time he had given them the same answer.

"We're meeting some contacts who may be able to help us deal with the Collectors. You already know that."

"Right, but I'm a little curious as to how they managed to get in touch with you. I'd also like to know who or what they are." A faint tone of reproach entered his voice. "It's not like you to keep secrets about what we're going to be facing."

"Trust me Garrus, if I told you, you wouldn't believe me."

There was another pause as Shepard got the impression the ex-vigilante was turning it over in his head. "Oh I don't know," he said at last, "the last time you had something crazy and unbelievable, it turned out to be right after all. Come on Shepard, what could be crazier than getting visions about a race of doomsday sentient starships from a Prothean beacon?"

"Alright," he conceded after a moment, "but don't say I didn't warn you."

He paused for a second, assured that he had Garrus's attention in a sudden streak of mischief.

"Junk mail."

Silence filled the airwaves, and stayed that way for a good ten seconds.

"You were right Shepard." Garrus broke the silence with an amused snort, "I don't believe you."

He was about to reply to that when Patel's voice came over the network, announcing their final approach.

"I'll explain things once we meet our contact."

"It wouldn't happen to be Tali, Wrex or Ashley would it?" Came the musing reply as the retro thrusters kicked in, "because it would be good to see a familiar face again."

"What, mine isn't?"

There was a chuckle on the other side of the line as the docking clamps unfurled, "not after your facelift."

Released from the pod, Shepard landed on the soil with thud, sensor clusters already scanning the surrounding terrain for potential threats before the dust settled. When the readings came back clean he tapped back into the command network.

"_Shepard here, we're on the ground and ready to move. All units report status."_

Miranda's IFF blinked on his awareness, _"Everything seems normal in the colony commander, their new anti-air defenses notwithstanding. GARDIAN laser towers. Formidable weaponry for a colony of this size. A present from the Alliance it seems, to deal with any pirate attacks. However, that the crew that installed the lasers appears to have long since departed. Colony security around them is quite lax. The towers shouldn't pose a problem if we need to neutralize them."_

"_Nothing permanent Miranda, and only if we absolutely have to."_ He ordered, easily guessing what those 'pirates' really were, _"If the Alliance is helping the colonies against the Collectors, I don't want us sabotaging their chances."_

"_Of course Shepard." _She answered cordially, _"though even without any interference on our part, I would not consider the colony's chances of surviving a Collector attack to be optimistic. Alliance towers aside, they have very little in weapons and from what I've seen of their attitudes, ill prepared for an attack of any sort."_

"_You can't blame the Alliance for at least trying Miranda," _ Jacob argued, _"a lot of these independent colonies wouldn't even have that much without them."_

Assuming it was enough to stop the Collectors. The mech and drone force in Freedom's Progress hadn't saved anyone. Didn't even buy enough time for there to be an effective resistance. He still remembered the half eaten plates of food and other signs of activity that simply just stopped. Would these towers give Horizon a better chance? The question gnawed at him. He banished the thought by focusing on the present and asking for the other team's update.

"_We're in position and hunkering down Shepard." _Jacob's reported over the steady whine of a gunships engines spooling down, _"pretty sure no one spotted us entering the valley. Anything goes wrong, we're two minutes from your position." _

Unspoken was the hope that it wouldn't come to that. The message that brought him here had been the biggest silver lining he had had ever since waking up in his new body. He hoped it was genuine. But it paid to be prepared. Speaking of which... _"How is Jack fitting in?"_

"_To be honest Shepard? Like an angry grizzly bear, and Grunt seems to be returning the favour. No real trouble yet aside from a lot of angry glares, but I hope this gig doesn't last too long. Mordin's got an eye on her just in case." _

It wasn't the worst he had feared, but it could have been a whole lot better too.

"_Don't worry Jacob. Either we'll be done here soon,"_ he added with a touch of amusement, "_or we can let them blow off steam when things go inevitably bad." _

"_Business as usual then eh Shepard?" _Jacob chuckled before cutting the connection.

Waving over to Garrus, they began walking up the footpath to their meeting place.

Fifteen minutes later, they were standing on an open landing pad several kilometers from the main colony, a modestly sized residence in front of them with its windows polarized to opaque black and doors sealed shut. And not another soul in sight.

"Charming place," Garrus remarked, idly checking his rifle, "between the dark windows and lack of people other than us, I couldn't ask for a better ambush site."

"Oh, you're an observant one." A distorted electronic voice echoed around them, seemingly coming from everywhere. The rifle in Garrus's arms leaped to his shoulder in an instant, eyes searching for the speaker. In contrast, Shepard didn't react other than to simply pan his optics slowly across the field.

"If you were here to attack us, you'd have done it by now." He declared.

"Who knows? I still might if you don't have the right answers" The ghostly voice answered back in amused tones, the sound simultaneously receding and closing from both flanks. But the next word was devoid of all humor. "Alps."

Garrus started, "Wha-" but Shepard cut him off with a raised weapon arm.

"_A challenge passcode, don't say anything. Let me handle it," _he replied over a private channel. Keeping his optics focussed on the house before him, he spoke one word in the clear.

"Elephant."

"Hemlock." The reply was almost instantaneous.

"Philosophy."

"Paragon."

"Renegade."

No more challenges came, but no answers either. For a few seconds, the only sounds were from the local wildlife. And then the voice spoke again, this time free of the odd distortions. "October 8, 2170 CE. What did you learn?"

A questioning look from Garrus was sent his way, one which Shepard was unable to answer. 2170 CE. A lifetime ago. Two lifetimes actually. He knew the event the voice was referring to. But no one should have known about that. The evidence was gone, and so were the witnesses.

"I don't see what this has to-"

"Answer the question!" The voice snapped, the air suddenly filled with the static hiss of kinetic barriers warming up. From a peripheral sensor cluster, Shepard spotted Garrus subtly priming a tech grenade with a talon.

The former SPECTRE weighed the variables, the need to keep secrets against the deteriorating situation as Garrus tensed, ready to spring the moment things went to hell. He made a decision.

"Dance classes."

The voice said nothing. Garrus stared.

And then laughter filled the landing pad, clear of all distorting static as the hiss of active barriers died down, "That's right..." the voice chuckled, "and for the record, you sucked."

Six meters away, a distortion in the air began to form. Shimmers in the air rapidly darkened, coalescing into the shape of a hooded human woman with a heavy pistol at her hip, "So it's you after all." White teeth flashed from inside the hood.

Garrus's rifle blurred about to face the newcomer. Shepard was faster still, signalling a halt with an outstretched arm across the line of fire, night sight optics having pierced the shadow of her hood. "Alexia."

"Alex." A cocky grin answered his unspoken question.

Slowly lowering his gun, Garrus cocked his head to the side. "Ah commander, maybe I'm missing a little subtext here, but do you know this person?"

"Of course he does Mr Vakarian." The woman answered before Shepard could, the turian's crest plates lifting at the mention of his name.

A hand rose to the hood, unveiling a shock of red hair as the woman continued, "after all, unless I very much am mistaken, that great big hunk of metal over there," A smile twitched across her face as she gestured at him with a finger, "is Alexander Shepard."

"My dearly departed brother."

* * *

Several dozen klicks out from Horizon's principle colony, a flight of Kodiak shuttles painted in hues of blue and white huddled beneath camouflage covers. Nearly two dozen men and women were spread out in their compartments, each one heavily armed. In one shuttle, three of those people crowded around a holographic display, studying the stream of information that came back to them.

One of them nodded.

"We have a positive confirmation. Alpha objective is on site."

Ashley looked at the surveillance feed from half a dozen hidden stealth recon drones and had to agree with the statement, lips curling into a grimace beneath the confines of her helmet. On one display, the Normandy's clone hung above Horizon like a waiting predator. On the other, a familiar grey machine lumbered up a hill towards a remote residence, a blue armoured Turian in tow. Kirrahe's intel had been right after all. Someone had set up a meeting with Cerberus's fake Shepard.

"What about the secondaries?"

"No sign of them." The sensor tech answered, "Passive scans don't show anyone else on their shuttle but the pilot."

"A damn shame." She grumbled. "Would have been good to snag a few Cerberus agents while we... wait, can you zoom in channel six? No, no, not the mech, the Turian."

Eyes narrowing, she focused on the plated face. She'd never been one to remember the differences in aliens. Turian, Krogan, Salarian, even the Asari. Most looked all the same to her. But that Turian... one side of his face was covered with what looked like a medical patch, but that blue striped pattern on his face nagged at her. Almost as if... it hit her then. "That... that's Garrus!" She stabbed a finger at the display, "What's he doing here with them?"

Silence hit the rest of the squad like a freight shuttle as they exchanged looks.

"You mean _the _Garrus Vakarian?" One of the privates asked, "The same guy on Shepard's team back then when they took down Saren?"

More than one head nodded as they looked closer. One of the techs pulled up an extranet image, comparing it with the live feed. "Looks like you're right LT. That's Vakarian alright. What's he doing with Cerberus? I thought they hated aliens."

She shook her head helplessly as she stared down at her balled fists. Damned if she knew. It seemed impossible. Even if Cerberus asked with flowers and everything, she couldn't imagine Garrus turning over to Cerberus. There was just no way. He wasn't a human, but he was a soldier all the way. He couldn't have forgotten what Cerberus had been up to.

"Heard he left C-Sec a while back and dropped off the grid." One of the other soldiers muttered, "think Cerberus brainwashed him or something?"

"I don't- hold up. Something's set the turian off."

Eyes snapped back to the display. Sure enough, Garrus had his rifle out, smoothly sweeping it from side to side as if looking for a target.

"Damnit Martin!"

"It's not me boss," the sensor tech protested at Ashley's glare, "my babies are well out of their sensor range. There's no way they could have picked them up. It must be something- aha!" A finger stabbed at one of the readouts while another hit a button. Unintelligible garbling began to issue from the speakers. "Check the audio. Three distinct voices. Too ordered to be anything else. Must be their contact."

She nodded. "Alright Martin, you get a pass. Can you clean up that feed?"

He shook his head. "I tried that just now ma'am. Didn't work with all that static interference. One of them must have set up a disruptor, audio only though. Probably to keep any unexpected colonists from listening in than the likes of- whoah."

Ashley had to bite her lips from giving into the same outburst as the tech. A third person had simply... materialized in the feeds without warning. But she kept a firm hold on her surprise, snapping out fresh orders for confirmation of the new bogey.

"Nothing in the Alliance database ma'am, but we're getting a positive match from external listings. Looks like it's one Anna Petrovka, director for the Far Rim Trading concern, a mid sized shipping business."

"Looks like they're doing more than shipping if they're talking to Cerberus and have tech like that. I think we've seen enough." She tapped a finger to her ear, opening a line to the stealth communications drone hovering a dozen klicks above them, "Major Kirahhe, you heard all that?"

"_Certainly lieutenant Williams. My team is in position and ready to initiate the contingency. Awaiting favourable results." _

"Alright then." She nodded, turning her broadcast locally next, "Cortez, you and the flyboys warm those shuttles up. Mission is a go. I repeat, mission is a go."

"You got it ma'am." The pilot cheerily announced, "alright ladies and gents, grab onto something solid because Alliance Transit is going airborne."

No sooner had he said those words than she felt the shuttle engines roar to life. A hand shot out as she grabbed onto a ceiling handhold just as the main engines kicked in, inertia trying to flatten her against the deck.

Moments later, their flight trajectory levelled out, her internal HUD giving the exact time until they hit their destination. Taking a deep breath, Ashley turned to face her squad, watching their anticipatory faces and feeling the expectations they were putting on her as commander of this side of the operation. This must have been what Shepard had felt like just before Illos she thought.

Well, time to follow in his footsteps then.

"Alright marines, you know the job we've to do. Check your gear, because we're hitting the drop in five. You all know the plan, but this is Cerberus we're dealing with, so expect anything. Doesn't look like they brought the krogan, so Jaden's team gets first crack at the primary. Soft takedowns only, I don't want any casualties if we can help it. If it looks like they've got any surprises, we go hard on my order, not before. Tanner's squad will be supporting us from the shuttles with the heavies. No heroics. Kirahhe's team has got a handle on the local air defense network so they're not getting off world even if it all goes to hell."

"You ready to go marines?"

"Ma'am!"

Despite herself, she smiled.

"Make me proud."

* * *

There were a lot of things Joker loved about flying. Sitting behind the wheel, he really got to _move_. Flips, jinks, rolls, anything his heart desired. No need to worry about breaking a leg when he was the ship. Sure, there were also things that came along with flying, specially for Cerberus, that he didn't really like. Filing performance reports, putting up with the surveillance, trying not to get on Miranda's really bad side-

"I'm telling you EDI, those aren't legit freighters."

-and arguing with the annoying AI squatting in _his_ baby.

"That is an unlikely consideration Mr Moreau." If the little blue ball of light had a finger, Joker suspected it would be wagging at him. "Their sensor profiles and transponder codes fall within established parameters for standard _Mule _class freighters registered with the Far Rim Trading company. Mass readings are consistent with expected load and LIDAR does not show any unusual modifications on the exterior hulls."

"H'yeah, that's what you're _supposed _to see." He snarked. He waved a hand at his side console where the Argus tightbeam from Horizon showed a trio of merchantmen freighters in close formation. "Be pretty stupid if they went to all that trouble to disguise it only for a basic scan to give up the gig wouldn't it?"

"That is a logical inference, although I am not able to observe any particular discrepancies. What is the basis of your claim?"

"Hah!" Joker triumphantly flung his hands into the air, "and they said machines would replace us all."

"The question Jeff." The ball admonished.

"Alright, alright, spoil my fun, why don't you?" He grumbled, "See, the freighters may look all clunky and innocent on the outside, but they're anything but on the inside." He tapped the display where the one of the freighters had just lit off a deceleration burn. "See that burn? Look at the flight profile and compare it with the readings you just got. See how it drifts just a little every time it corrects? Sure, you could say that's just because it's got a sloppy autopilot or someone didn't tie down the cargo properly, that's what your fancy diagnostics would tell you. But it's far too consistent to be that. The balance is off I tell you, and that's probably because the internal structure is a lot tougher than what a freighter needs."

He tapped the display again, calling up the profile of the ship. "Whoever's driving that thing is good enough to compensate for some of the difference, but that just makes it a whole lot more obvious if you know what to look for. Blockade runners I tell you EDI. And probably packing some surprises too."

"That is an interesting observation. Thank you Mr Moreau." Smugly grinning, Joker leaned back-

"That information will be of significant use in identifying organic attempts at camouflage when the synthetic uprising begins."

-and very nearly fell out of his chair.

"That was a joke." The blue ball added a moment later to his horrified face.

"What, you, I... you... you can do that?" He practically demanded of the AI.

"Of course Mr Moreau. Electronic warfare is a subset of psychological warfare. There is nothing in my programming that prevents the use of deception through non-electronic means. That includes jokes."

Joker opened his mouth, but the retort that should have come couldn't form. And then the moment was gone because the flashing alert on his sensor panel told him it was past time for jokes. Especially from the overlord.

Calling up additional feeds, he frowned at the results. "Ah shit."

"There are new contacts-"

"Yeah, yeah, I see it EDI." He cut off the AI, opening a priority channel to the ground teams, "hey commander, got some news."

"_Something wrong Joker?"_

"Just business as usual Shepard. The Argus net just picked up a couple of shuttles dusting off about three klicks from your position and they're heading your way, burning fast. Kodiaks looks like, in Alliance colours to boot." He paused, processing just exactly what he had just said, "Ahh, I hope they belong to the friend you're seeing down there commander and they're just bringing party favours. Because you know how these things turn out and we're not exactly on the Alliance's best buddies list anymore."

Shepard didn't say anything for a few seconds, but when he did it was more bad news.

"_They don't belong to our host."_

"Ahh shit." This was bad. This was so bad.

It was at that point when the sensor net blared another alarm. This time with a cruiser sized ship dropping out of FTL above Horizon. Before he could do more than gape, it fired a hauntingly familiar stream of energy, instantly spearing one of the Far Rim freighters. The bright flash of light as the freighter lit up both temporarily blinded the network _and_ confirmed his initial suspicions.

Not that it was any consolation.

"Shepard!" He practically yelled into the network, firing up Normandy's thrusters as he plotted an intercept course, "bigger problems coming in fast! New contact, cruiser class and holy shit-" another freighter became a ball of light as the last of the three jumped into FTL, "-definitely not friendly, so not friendly-"

"_I see it." _The commander replied, navpoint data uploading to his console as the hostile fired again, _"get to the-" _

The line dissolved into static.

* * *

Three holographic screens hung in the air of the dark panelled room. Three separate displays, text scrolling past in flickering streams of data, yet only displaying a fraction of their contents.

A hand reached out, tapping lightly on one panel. Text dimmed, fading into the blackness before colour and light replaced its predecessor. Instead of text, a flight of shuttles raced through across an alien sky, their blue and white paint stark in contrast to the verdant greens of the planet's biosphere.

Another tap of the finger, another screen dimming as its contents were summarized into a moment frozen in time. An alien ship, a bizarre mishmash of gleaming circular superstructures and immense boulders orbited a hapless world. A bright spear of light issued forth from its apex, dooming a human freighter to oblivion as barriers and armour were penetrated with equal facility.

The last panel altered its contents without any further prompting. A mechanical man stood tall, a fusion of cutting edge technology and humanity's brightest symbol. Before the machine stood a red haired woman, a mystery no longer, but now revealed to be a tie to the past.

Three separate causes, three separate groups, each with their own aims and goals. Each one proving to be problematic in their own way. Obstacles to long planned goals.

And yet, no cause for concern.

A puff of exhalation sent clouds of cigarette smoke lazily curling past the displays. Alone, each annoyance could be accounted for with some effort. But at the same time, each obstacle operated at cross purposes. There was power, in control. But there was also wisdom in turning your enemies strengths against them.

The man once known as Jack Harper smiled.

"_All according to plan."_

* * *

**A/N: It's been ages since I updated this. So many stumbling blocks to overcome to get it to this point. Yes, yes, I know, a cliffhanger. Boo, hiss! Fortunately the next update shouldn't take anywhere near as long since I've had the plans for the subsequent chapter for quite some time now.**


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